Filing your crypto tax with Inland Revenue

Declaring cryptoasset income in New Zealand is administratively simple and evidentially demanding. There is no special crypto form and no separate rate — the profit goes into your return as other income. What Inland Revenue expects behind that number is a complete, reconciled record, and that is where the work is.

Step one: gather everything before you calculate anything

You need a complete transaction history from every exchange, broker, wallet, ATM and peer-to-peer trade you have used, for every year in which you held cryptoassets. Not just the year you sold — the acquisitions determine your cost base.

Download the exports now rather than when you need them. This is not theoretical caution: New Zealand has lost five platforms since 2019, and each closure gave customers a limited window to retrieve their history. Easy Crypto made trading records available for download during its wind-down and a great many customers did not use it. Kiwi-Coin, Dasset, BitPrime and Cryptopia customers all faced versions of the same problem.

Step two: reconcile transfers between your own wallets

This is where naive calculations go wrong. When you withdraw Bitcoin from an exchange to your own hardware wallet, the exchange export shows a withdrawal. A tool that does not know the destination is yours may treat that as a disposal, inventing a taxable event that did not occur.

Moving cryptoassets between wallets you control is not a disposal and creates no tax liability. But you must be able to demonstrate it, which means keeping the transaction IDs linking the outbound and inbound sides. Crypto tax software handles this automatically once you tell it which addresses are yours.

Step three: value everything in New Zealand dollars

Every acquisition and every disposal needs a New Zealand dollar value at the time it occurred. For a purchase with NZD that is trivial. For a coin-to-coin swap it is the market value of the asset you gave up on the day of the swap. For crypto spent on goods, it is the value at the moment of purchase. For staking, mining or airdrop income, it is the market value when you received it.

Use a consistent source for pricing and note which one you used. Inland Revenue does not mandate a specific price feed but does expect a reasonable and consistently applied method.

Step four: use software if you have more than a handful of trades

Manual reconciliation works for someone with five purchases and one sale. It does not work for someone with three hundred trades across four platforms and two wallets, and attempting it produces errors in both directions.

Crypto tax software connects to exchanges and wallets, matches internal transfers, applies a pricing source and produces a report you can use as the supporting calculation. Several established products support New Zealand rules and the New Zealand tax year. Expect to pay somewhere between NZ$100 and NZ$400 depending on transaction volume — considerably less than an accountant's time to do the same reconciliation by hand.

Whatever you use, keep the underlying exports as well as the report. If Inland Revenue asks questions in three years, you want the raw data, not just a summary.

Step five: file it

Net crypto income is declared as other income in your IR3 individual income tax return, or through myIR. You do not attach the calculation; you keep it. The figure you enter is the net result after profits, losses, allowable fees and other crypto income.

Deadlines: the New Zealand tax year ends 31 March. If you file yourself, the IR3 is due by 7 July. If you are linked to a registered tax agent, you generally have until 31 March the following year. If your residual income tax passes the relevant threshold, provisional tax obligations may arise for the following year — worth knowing before a large disposal rather than after.

If you are behind

A significant number of New Zealanders have several years of undeclared crypto income. This is a fixable problem and it gets worse with time, particularly now that reporting crypto-asset service providers have been collecting and reporting user data under the OECD framework since 1 April 2026, with the first reports due to Inland Revenue by 30 June 2027.

The mechanism is a voluntary disclosure. Making one before Inland Revenue contacts you generally produces a materially better outcome on shortfall penalties than being found. It involves reconstructing the history, calculating the income for each year, and filing amended returns.

Do not do this alone if the amounts are meaningful. An accountant who has run crypto disclosures before will know how to present it and what Inland Revenue expects — our accountants page covers finding one.

The checklist

1. Export everything from every platform and wallet, for every year.
2. Identify your own wallet addresses so internal transfers are not counted as sales.
3. Value every event in NZD using a consistent, documented source.
4. Include all crypto income — staking, mining, airdrops, salary paid in crypto.
5. Deduct allowable costs including trading fees and, where applicable, realised losses.
6. File by 7 July, or through your tax agent.
7. Keep the records for seven years after disposal, and acquisition records for as long as you hold.