Taxes When Buying Bitcoin in Germany

Short answer: Buying bitcoin in Germany costs no tax, neither income tax nor VAT. Still, the purchase decides your later tax: its date starts the one-year holding period, and its price plus fees is your cost basis. If you record each purchase properly, you can sell tax-free later and prove it (as of November 2026).

This article covers only the moment of purchase: what happens for tax purposes and what you should record. How sales are taxed, how the exemption threshold works and what goes into your tax return is in the complete guide to bitcoin taxes in Germany.

Is buying bitcoin taxable?

No. When you buy bitcoin with euros, there is no gain and no income. The tax office only cares once you give the bitcoin away again: by selling, swapping or paying with them.

For German tax law, privately held bitcoin are an "other asset" (anderes Wirtschaftsgut), much like gold. The rules for private sales transactions under section 23 of the Income Tax Act (EStG) apply. Under them, only a gain from a sale within one year of the purchase is taxable. The purchase itself is just the starting point.

No VAT on bitcoin

Anyone who buys gold knows the VAT question: investment gold is exempt, silver is not. For bitcoin the question is settled across Europe. On 22.10.2015 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in the Hedqvist case (C-264/14) that exchanging legal tender for bitcoin and back is exempt from VAT. Bitcoin is treated like a means of payment, not like a commodity.

The German Federal Ministry of Finance has adopted this ruling for Germany. For you this means: the price you pay contains no VAT, and none is added on top.

What to record for every purchase

The holding period only helps you if you can prove it. If the tax office asks in three years why a sale was tax-free, you need the purchase from back then. If you cannot show it, the tax office may estimate. The Ministry of Finance's 2025 letter explicitly stresses these duties to cooperate, especially for foreign exchanges.

So record for every purchase:

What counts is the day the purchase was executed, not the day you withdraw the bitcoin to your wallet. For an order placed in the evening and executed the next morning, the execution counts.

Most exchanges and apps offer a transaction list as CSV or an annual report as PDF. Download both every year and store them outside the provider. Exchanges disappear, accounts get closed, exports sometimes go back only a few years. The collapses from Mt. Gox to FTX show how fast that can happen.

How long to keep it?

There is no fixed period for private individuals. In practice: keep the records of a purchase as long as you hold those bitcoin, and afterwards until the tax assessment for the year of the sale is final. For long-term holders that easily means ten years or more.

Fees are part of the purchase price

What you pay for the purchase counts as acquisition cost for tax purposes: the purchase price plus incidental costs such as trading or order fees. This matters if you do sell within a year after all. Then only the gain above this acquisition cost is taxable.

The spread is trickier. Many apps advertise "0 % fee" and earn on the difference between buy and sell price. This markup is already in the price you pay and therefore automatically in your cost basis. You don't need to list it separately. How high spreads and fees are from provider to provider is shown in Bitcoin fees when buying.

Savings plan: many small purchases, many periods

For tax purposes a savings plan is simply many separate purchases. Each execution is its own lot with its own date, its own price and its own one-year period. If you have bought weekly for five years, you have more than 250 such lots.

That sounds like a lot of work but is harmless as long as you don't sell. The providers keep the list for you; you only need to save it. It becomes relevant when you want to sell a part: then you need to know which lots are already older than a year.

For savers this means: don't sell in the first year if you can avoid it. After that, the tax-free part grows every month. Which providers offer savings plans at which intervals is in the savings plan comparison.

FIFO: which bitcoin count as sold?

Bitcoin are interchangeable. If you bought at different times, it is often impossible to say which lot leaves when you sell. The law solves this with FIFO ("first in, first out"): the bitcoin bought first count as sold first.

The Federal Ministry of Finance set out how this applies in its letter of 10.05.2022, stating that FIFO applies per wallet or account separately, not across all your holdings together. The letter of 06.03.2025 replaced the earlier one and kept this rule. How FIFO and the permitted calculation methods work exactly when you sell is explained in the tax guide.

For the purchase this raises a practical question: where do the bitcoin go? Where a lot sits decides which FIFO queue it is in. That is why the wallet belongs in your purchase list.

A proven pattern for long-term holders:

1. Buy on an exchange or app, regularly via a savings plan.
2. Withdraw older holdings to your own wallet and leave them there.
3. Keep on the exchange only what you might need soon.

That way old, tax-free bitcoin don't mix with fresh purchases whose period is still running.

Moving coins to your own wallet is not a sale

When you move bitcoin from the exchange to your hardware wallet, only the location changes, not the owner. Nothing happens for tax purposes. The bitcoin keep their purchase date and price, and the one-year period simply continues.

So that this can be traced later, record the date, amount, destination address and transaction ID of each withdrawal. With the ID anyone can see in a block explorer that the bitcoin arrived with you. Record the withdrawal's network fee as well.

Since 2026 the exchange reports such withdrawals to the tax authorities under DAC8. That is not a problem: the tax office only sees that you withdrew bitcoin, and that is tax-free. What is reported and what is not is in DAC8 and CARF explained.

Not every acquisition is a purchase with euros

How you get your bitcoin changes the tax consequences:

Buying from private individuals comes with no annual report. Keep the receipt, the chat history with date and amount, and the transaction ID with which the bitcoin reached you. How such purchases work is explained in Peer-to-peer buying.

With a swap, the other crypto asset is what counts: if you bought it less than a year ago and it has risen in value, swapping it into bitcoin is a taxable sale. The new bitcoin then start their own period, with the euro value on the day of the swap as their cost basis.

If you buy a spot ETF instead of bitcoin, the rules for fund units apply, not section 23 EStG. What that means is in Bitcoin spot ETFs: what investors need to know.

Lending and staking: what changes after the purchase

Bitcoin itself has no staking. Offers using that name are usually lending: you hand your bitcoin to a platform and receive interest.

• The period stays one year. It was once argued that lent crypto assets would need to be held for ten years. The Ministry of Finance rejected that.
• The interest is income. If you receive interest in bitcoin, it is other income when received, valued at that day's euro price. This income has its own exemption threshold of €256 per year.
• Each interest payment is a new acquisition. It gets its own date and its own value, so its own row in your purchase list.

So lending is not dangerous for tax purposes. The bigger risk is a different one: the bitcoin sit with a third party that can go bankrupt.

What a tax reform would mean for your purchases

As of November 2026 the one-year period applies unchanged. The Federal Ministry of Finance has presented a draft that would abolish it for newly bought bitcoin. According to reports on it, bitcoin bought earlier would stay under the old rule. It is not law; details are in the tax guide.

For your purchases this mainly means: good records become even more valuable. If there were a cut-off date, you would have to show for every lot whether it was bought before or after it. If you record every purchase with its date today, you are prepared for both.