One bitcoin held by a Swiss resident was worth CHF 85,926.49 for tax purposes on 31 December 2024, and CHF 69,571.99 a year later, according to the year-end values the Federal Tax Administration (ESTV) publishes on its ICTax platform. Nobody had to sell a single coin for those numbers to matter. Crypto tax in Switzerland works the other way round from what most readers expect: the profit a private investor makes on a sale is normally tax-free, while the coins themselves are counted in taxable wealth every year at their value on 31 December.
So a Swiss holder faces three questions, in this order. What goes on the return at year-end? Which receipts count as income, from staking rewards to a salary paid in bitcoin? And at what point does the tax office stop seeing a private investor and start seeing a quasi-professional trader, whose gains are taxed like a business profit? Then come five cantons side by side, and the international reporting of crypto accounts, which cannot start in Switzerland before 1 January 2027.
If terms such as disposal, cost basis or taxable event are new to you, start with our introduction to crypto taxes. The previous lesson of this path covered crypto taxes in Belgium; Switzerland is a very different system, so little of it carries over.
How crypto tax in Switzerland works: holdings taxed, private profits not
Switzerland has no crypto tax statute. The reference text is a working paper of the ESTV, dated Bern, 14 December 2021, titled (in German) “Kryptowährungen und Initial Coin/Token Offerings (ICOs/ITOs) als Gegenstand der Vermögens-, Einkommens- und Gewinnsteuer, der Verrechnungssteuer und der Stempelabgaben”. It replaced a first version of 27 August 2019 and, by its own account, reflects the practice on cases submitted to the ESTV up to the end of December 2020. As of October 2026 the ESTV crypto page lists no newer version. The working paper is a free PDF.
The paper sorts tokens into three groups taken from FINMA guidance of February 2018: payment tokens (bitcoin and similar coins), asset tokens and utility tokens. For someone who simply buys and holds coins, the payment-token part is the one that applies, and its logic is simple. Payment tokens are treated like foreign currency. Holding them is wealth. Buying and selling them, for a private person, produces capital gains that are in principle tax-free, and losses that cannot be deducted.
Two levels of government are involved. The Confederation levies an income tax but no wealth tax at all; the wealth tax is cantonal, collected together with the communal tax. Income tax, by contrast, is due both federally and to the canton and commune. That is why the rate you pay on your coins depends on where you live, while the principles are the same in the 26 cantons.
Two other texts fill in the details. The first is the ESTV Circular No. 36 of 27 July 2012 on professional securities trading. It was written for shares and bonds, not crypto, and it applies to crypto by analogy only: the working paper says so in a footnote, and the cantons of Zug, Zürich and Aargau repeat it. The second is each canton’s own guidance, which decides the line on the form and the price source for coins without an official value.
Large areas are not covered by any federal text. A search of the full working paper finds nothing on crypto lending, hard forks, NFTs or DeFi positions. Where this lesson says something about those, it comes from a canton, and it is flagged as such.
Wealth tax on your crypto holdings at 31 December
The value that counts is the market value at year-end
The working paper classes payment tokens as movable, tradable and intangible assets that are subject to cantonal wealth tax and must be declared at their market value at the end of the tax period. For a person, the tax period is the calendar year, and the Zürich tax office states it plainly: taxable wealth is measured as it stands at the end of the year. What you held on 1 March or in July does not matter; the snapshot is 31 December.
Which price? For the most widespread coins, the ESTV publishes an official year-end value in its rate list on ICTax. The canton of Geneva explains that these values are an average of prices on several trading platforms. A query of the ICTax platform on 25 October 2026 returned values for five tokens at each of the last three year-ends: bitcoin, ether, litecoin, bitcoin cash and XRP.
| Token | 31 Dec 2023 (CHF) | 31 Dec 2024 (CHF) | 31 Dec 2025 (CHF) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (BTC) | 35,541.63 | 85,926.49 | 69,571.99 |
| Ether (ETH) | 1,948.01 | 3,083.56 | 2,364.08 |
| Litecoin (LTC) | 63.51 | 94.40 | 61.24 |
| Bitcoin Cash (BCH) | 219.59 | 406.35 | 470.57 |
| XRP | 0.52 | 1.92 | 1.47 |
Source: ESTV, ICTax rate list, values per unit rounded to the centime, retrieved 25 October 2026. On the website choose the year, then the crypto section of the list.
For a coin that is not on the list, the paper allows the market value on one of the leading trading platforms. If no current price can be found at all, the coin is declared at its original purchase price converted into Swiss francs. Zug, Aargau and Geneva apply that order; Zürich’s 2017 note gives only the first two steps. The cantonal section below sets out the differences. Proof is simple: Zug, Zürich and Aargau accept a printout of the wallet or account balance at year-end, so save a dated screenshot or statement on 31 December, for self-custody wallets as well as for exchange accounts.
The table also shows how the tax base moves on its own. The ESTV value of bitcoin rose by about 142% between the 2023 and 2024 year-ends, then fell by about 19% between 2024 and 2025. A holder of one bitcoin declared roughly CHF 16,350 less wealth for 2025 than for 2024 without doing anything. The reverse is also true: wealth tax is due in a year when the price has fallen, because the tax looks at the year-end value, not at whether you made money. The 31 December 2026 values will only exist once the year is over.
A worked example with hypothetical holdings
Take a hypothetical resident who held 1.5 BTC and 10 ETH on 31 December 2025, and nothing else in crypto. Using the ESTV values in the table, the bitcoin counts for 1.5 x 69,571.99 = CHF 104,357.98 and the ether for 10 x 2,364.08 = CHF 23,640.80. The total, about CHF 128,000, is added to the rest of the person’s taxable wealth (bank accounts, securities, property, minus debts) on the 2025 return. If the same resident had also held a small token that the ESTV does not list, its year-end price on a leading exchange, converted to francs, would be added in the same way.
For this part, the trades made during the year do not have to be reconstructed. What counts is the number of units on 31 December and the official or market value at that date.
What the wealth tax costs depends on canton, commune and total wealth
There is no single Swiss wealth tax rate. Each canton has its own tariff and allowances, and the commune adds its own multiplier. Zürich is a good illustration of the mechanism. Its official tax overview (Kantonales Steueramt, November 2023) says the “simple state tax” on wealth ranges from 0 to a maximum of 3 per mille. That simple tax is then multiplied by the cantonal multiplier, 99% for the 2023 tax year, and by the communal multiplier, which for individuals ranged from 72% to 130% in 2023, church tax excluded.
Back to the hypothetical holder, with assumptions chosen only to show the method. Suppose the rest of their wealth already puts them in the bracket taxed at Zürich’s 3 per mille maximum, that they live in a commune with a multiplier of 100% (inside the published range), and that the 2023 multipliers still applied. Each extra franc of crypto would then cost 3 per mille x (99% + 100%) = 5.97 per mille, so the CHF 128,000 of coins would add about CHF 764 of tax for the year, church tax not included.
A smaller fortune falls into lower brackets, multipliers are set again every year and another canton has another tariff. The CHF 764 is therefore a hypothetical figure, not an estimate for any real taxpayer.
A private investor who does not trade like a business and earns no staking or other yield owes nothing else in Switzerland on the coins. This yearly charge falls due whether the market rose or fell.
Is crypto tax free in Switzerland for private investors?
The rule: private capital gains are exempt, losses are not deductible
For a private person, yes, as far as gains go. The working paper treats buying and selling payment tokens like currency transactions. Under article 16 paragraph 3 of the federal direct tax act (DBG), gains on private movable assets are tax-free, and the paper concludes that the result is, in principle, tax-free capital gains or non-deductible capital losses. The cantons write the same rule into their own laws: Zug cites § 23 of its tax act, Aargau § 33, Zürich § 16 paragraph 3. Geneva puts it in one line on its page: gains from selling crypto held in private wealth are not subject to income tax, and losses cannot be deducted.
Swapping one coin for another is treated in the same way, since the paper equates these trades with currency exchanges. Whether you sell bitcoin for francs or for ether, a private investor owes no income tax on the gain. You still need to know how many units you hold at year-end, and keeping a history of trades is useful if the tax office ever asks how a position was built or questions your status (next section). The methods in our guide on how to calculate crypto capital gains matter less here than in France or the US, but they become relevant the moment you are classed as a professional.
The paper also says what simply holding coins produces: in the ESTV’s words it “generiert in aller Regel keine Einkünfte” (as a rule produces no income), as section 2.2.2 of the paper puts it. Holding is a wealth question, not an income question.
What stays taxable even for a private investor
The exemption covers capital gains, not everything that arrives in a wallet. A salary or a fringe benefit paid in tokens is ordinary employment income under article 17 of the DBG. The employer reports it on the salary certificate (Lohnausweis, figure 1 or 3), at the value in francs at the moment the employee receives it. Payments a self-employed person receives in crypto for their work are business income, as the Aargau page also notes.
The other big exception is yield: staking, blockchain and earns a reward, which makes rewriting history very expensive.">mining, airdrops and, in Geneva, lending. It has its own section further down, because it is where many holders who never trade still end up owing income tax.
When a private investor becomes a quasi-professional trader
The tax-free label is not something the taxpayer picks. It depends on facts: how often you trade, how long you hold, whether you borrow, how you organise the activity. If those facts look like a business, the gains are no longer private capital gains but self-employment income under article 18 of the DBG. The working paper says this can happen depending on the nature, scale and financing of the transactions, and sends the reader, in a footnote, to Circular 36.
The five safe-harbour criteria of Circular 36
Circular No. 36 of 27 July 2012 sets a preliminary check. If all five criteria below are met together, the tax authorities assume private wealth management in every case. Read “securities” as “coins” when you apply it to crypto, because that is what the analogy means.
| Criterion | Safe-harbour condition (all five must be met) |
|---|---|
| 1. Holding period | The assets sold were held for at least 6 months |
| 2. Transaction volume | All purchase prices plus all sale proceeds in the calendar year total no more than 5 times the securities and cash holdings at the start of the tax period |
| 3. Reliance on gains | Gains are not needed to replace missing or lost income for living costs, which is regularly the case when realised gains are under 50% of net income for the period |
| 4. Borrowing | The investments are not financed with debt, or the taxable income from them (interest, dividends) exceeds the proportional debt interest |
| 5. Derivatives | Buying and selling derivatives (options in particular) is limited to hedging your own positions |
Each condition is a yes-or-no test, and the list is cumulative: one “no” takes you out of the safe harbour. The circular calls the use of borrowed money the strongest sign of professional trading.
Failing a criterion is not a verdict
Outside the safe harbour, the circular says professional trading can no longer be ruled out, and the overall circumstances decide. It does not say that failing one criterion makes you a professional, although it adds that in a given case one indicator can be enough on its own. Following a Federal Supreme Court judgment of 23 October 2009 (2C_868/2008), it ranks the signs. The main indicators are a high transaction volume (frequent trades and short holding periods), the use of significant borrowed funds and a use of derivatives that goes beyond hedging. Two minor indicators, a systematic or planned approach such as reinvesting gains in similar assets, and a close link to the person’s profession or special expertise, cannot on their own make someone a professional, but they strengthen the case when a main indicator is present.
One sentence of the circular deserves attention: under some circumstances a single transaction can be enough. That is rare, but it shows that the test is about the character of the activity, not a count of trades. The official texts on crypto rely on this securities case law; they set no crypto-specific thresholds.
What the reclassification costs
A quasi-professional trader is taxed like a self-employed person. Gains become taxable income at federal, cantonal and communal level. The upside is that losses become deductible: Zug and Aargau say so, and Geneva adds that they must have been recorded in the accounts. For wealth tax, coins held as business assets are carried at book value (Zug, Aargau and Geneva all say so), and Zug and Aargau add that price movements go through the books under commercial accounting rules.
Paperwork changes too. Geneva asks self-employed taxpayers to attach signed annual accounts (balance sheet and income statement) to the return, or at least statements of receipts and expenses, of wealth and of private withdrawals and contributions.
Why crypto trading can trip the checklist sooner than shares
This is our reading of the criteria, not an official statement. Crypto markets trade every day of the year, and many holders rotate between coins in a way few share investors do. Each swap is both a sale and a purchase, so on a plain reading of criterion 2 it adds to the yearly volume twice. A holder with CHF 50,000 in coins and cash at the start of the year reaches the five-times limit at CHF 250,000 of purchases and sales combined. Positions held for weeks fail criterion 1. Leverage on an exchange, or perpetual futures used to bet rather than to hedge, points against criteria 4 and 5. None of this makes an active holder a professional automatically, but it is the kind of pattern that leads a canton to look at the whole picture.
Staking, mining and airdrops are taxed as income
Staking rewards: income at the moment you receive them
Staking is where most long-term holders meet Swiss income tax. The working paper describes proof-of-stake networks in which validators lock tokens and earn a reward, often through staking pools. The reward a smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool pays to an individual investor qualifies, in principle, as income from movable assets under article 20 paragraph 1 of the DBG. It is valued in francs at the time it flows in, meaning when you receive it or acquire a firm legal claim to it.
If you stake without a pool and run a validator yourself, the paper asks whether that activity amounts to self-employment; if it does, the rewards are self-employment income under article 18. For most people who stake through an exchange or a pool, the investment-income treatment is the one that applies.
Zug’s crypto leaflet of 22 July 2022 spells out the practice: staking, validator and nominator income is taxable investment income, declared per currency in section B of the securities list, valued on the day of the legal claim and added up for the tax period. Geneva lists staking among the crypto yields to declare as “rendements de fortune”. The rewards are taxed twice in a sense, but on different things: once as income when they arrive, and then, like any other coin, as wealth if you still hold them on 31 December.
Mining and transaction fees
Mining remuneration under proof of work is taxable income under article 16 paragraph 1 of the DBG. If the general criteria of self-employment are met, it is taxed as income from self-employment. Zürich says this for mining outright, and Zug adds that transaction fees earned are taxable as well, either as self-employment or as employment income.
Airdrops
An airdrop is income when the tokens are allocated. The working paper taxes it at the market value at that moment, as income from movable assets. A token with no market at allocation raises the same valuation problem as any unlisted coin, and the cantons’ fallback rules apply.
Lending, DeFi, NFTs and forks: no federal text
Here the official guidance runs out. The ESTV paper says nothing on crypto lending, liquidity provision, proof of stake coin with a protocol that stakes it for you and issues a transferable token (such as Lido stETH or rETH) representing the deposit plus rewards, which you can use or sell while the coins stay staked.">liquid staking, wrapped tokens, NFTs or hard forks. Geneva is the only one of the cantons checked for this lesson that names lending and liquidity mining, and it treats both, like staking and airdrops, as investment income. Zug and Aargau say that tokens carrying extra rights, such as dividend, voting or interest claims, are assessed case by case. If a large part of your activity is in DeFi, ask your cantonal tax office for its practice before you file, and keep the on-chain records of what you received and when.
Costs you can and cannot deduct
Against investment income, the paper allows only costs directly linked to earning it and needed to manage the assets (article 32 paragraph 1 of the DBG). Transaction costs tied to buying, switching or selling coins are not deductible. For a private investor, exchange fees therefore reduce nothing on the return.
Cantonal differences: same principle, different form lines
Federal law fixes the principles; the cantons run the wealth tax, set its rates and decide how a coin appears on the form. The five cantons below publish crypto guidance that could be checked for this lesson. Their texts are of very different ages, which is a reason to read your own canton’s current instructions before filing.
| Canton | Where crypto goes on the return | Coins without an ESTV value | Staking and other yields | Text and date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zug | Securities and assets list, code KR in the first column | Year-end price of the platform used (CoinMarketCap as an indication), else purchase price in CHF | Staking, validator and nominator income declared per currency in section B | Leaflet, 22 July 2022 |
| Zürich | Securities and assets list, under “übrige Guthaben”, naming the currency | Year-end price on the most common exchange for that coin (bitcoin at the ESTV value) | Not mentioned; mining is self-employment income | Steuerbuch 16.5, in force since 20 December 2017 |
| Aargau | Form 101.05, code KR in the first column | Year-end price of the platform used, else purchase price in CHF | Not mentioned; mining and fees taxable | Web page, still showing the 2024 bitcoin value in October 2026 |
| Geneva | État des titres | Price on 31 December on trading platforms, else acquisition value | Mining, staking, liquidity mining, lending, airdrops declared as investment income | Web page updated 11 November 2025 |
| Vaud | Code 420, with cash, gold and precious metals | Market value; some common coins are in the federal list | No passage on staking in the 2025 instructions | Instructions générales 2025 |
Sources: Zug, Zürich, Aargau, Geneva and Vaud tax administrations, consulted October 2026.
In Vaud, the 2025 instructions place crypto under code 420, while the VaudTax software also shows a heading for accounts and savings books including crypto under code 410. Our reading, not the canton’s wording, is that a balance held on a platform account may belong under 410 and coins in self-custody under 420; check with the canton if you are unsure.
The rates themselves are not crypto-specific. A franc of bitcoin is taxed exactly like a franc in a savings account, at whatever wealth tax tariff your canton and commune apply. Moving between two communes of the same canton can change the bill, since Zürich’s communal multipliers alone ranged from 72% to 130% in 2023.
Reporting: what Swiss platforms send abroad, and when
Switzerland already exchanges bank account data with partner countries under the OECD Common Reporting Standard. An amendment that took effect on 1 January 2026 extended the term “financial asset” to certain crypto assets and added rules for some e-money products and central bank digital currencies, according to the State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF) question-and-answer document updated on 18 May 2026.
The dedicated crypto framework, the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), comes later. Parliament approved the multilateral agreement on CARF in its final vote of 26 September 2025. The SIF says Switzerland will implement CARF at the earliest from 1 January 2027, and that Parliament decides the date. The Federal Council can ratify the agreement only once Parliament has approved the partner states for the exchange. Until then, the CARF provisions do not apply in Switzerland: no due-diligence duties for crypto service providers in 2026, and no crypto data received from abroad for calendar year 2026.
None of this changes what a taxpayer must do, and it does not change crypto tax in Switzerland itself. Holdings and income go on the return whether or not anyone reports them, and a canton can ask for wallet or exchange statements at any time.
Americans and Britons living in Switzerland
The Swiss exemption on private gains is a Swiss rule. It does not bind the IRS. A US citizen living in Zürich or Geneva is taxed by the United States on worldwide income, so a gain that is tax-free in Switzerland is still a capital gain on the US return, with the rules explained in our lesson on crypto taxes in the United States. Switzerland levies no income tax on that private gain, so there is no Swiss income tax to set against the US bill; the Swiss wealth tax on the same coins is not an income tax.
Reporting adds two layers. For Form 8938, a US taxpayer living abroad files when specified foreign assets exceed $200,000 on the last day of the year or $300,000 at any time ($400,000 and $600,000 for joint filers), according to the IRS comparison of Form 8938 and FBAR. The FBAR applies once foreign financial accounts exceed $10,000 in total at any time in the year, which a Swiss franc bank account easily reaches. On crypto itself, FinCEN said in Notice 2020-2 of 30 December 2020 that an account holding only virtual currency was not then reportable on the FBAR, and that it intended to change the rule; check the current status before you file.
For British readers, the question is residence. A UK resident who keeps coins with a Swiss platform is taxed by HMRC on disposals as described in our lesson on crypto taxes in the United Kingdom; holding them in Switzerland changes nothing. A Briton who has become resident in Switzerland is in the Swiss system described above, wealth tax included. Canada, where the line between capital gains and business income also decides most cases, is the subject of a later lesson.
The next dates to watch are close together. The ESTV will publish the 31 December 2026 values on ICTax after the year closes, and those are the figures that go on the 2026 return; CARF cannot start in Switzerland before 1 January 2027.
