The position until 2025: no rate of its own for crypto
This is the part that guides from earlier years still describe, and they were right: up to and including tax year 2025, Cyprus tax law contained no provision that named crypto-assets.
Taxation followed general principles, and the question was the same every time: is this a private rearrangement of assets or a trading activity? The answer depended on holding period, frequency and scale, and it fell case by case. For taxpayers that meant no predictability.
Since 1 January 2026 there is a rate.
It was introduced as Article 20E of the Income Tax Law, through the Income Tax (Amending) (No. 4) Law of 2025. Parliament passed it on 22 December 2025 and it was published on 31 December 2025 in the Official Gazette.
Disposal: the four events that trigger the tax
This is the section that decides whether a set of records is complete. Four events trigger the charge:
- Sale for fiat currency. The obvious one.
- Exchange of one crypto-asset for another. No money moves, the tax arises anyway.
- Payment with a crypto-asset. Settle an invoice in crypto and you have disposed.
- A gift.
Mining and staking: not covered by the 8 percent
Article 20E reaches disposals and nothing else. Income that is not a disposal stays under the general rules:
- Mining: not a disposal event, taxed under the ordinary rules.
- Staking, lending and comparable returns: likewise.
For a company that means 15 % corporate tax; for an individual, the income tax scale with a top rate of 35 %. Selling the coins received is then a disposal again and falls under the 8 %.
Non-dom does not change the 8 percent
This is the question almost everyone asks at this point, and the answer is inconvenient.
The reason is that two different taxes in two different statutes are involved:
- The Special Defence Contribution is charged on dividends, interest and rent. Non-dom status exempts you from it.
- Income tax covers everything else. Article 20E sits in that statute.
An exemption from one does not reach the other. Non-dom was never a general tax exemption, always a narrow one: no Defence Contribution on passive income. A non-dom pays income tax on salary like anyone else, and the 8 % on crypto in the same way.
Anyone genuinely looking for 0 % is looking for non-residence, not non-dom. A person not tax resident in Cyprus is not taxed there on crypto disposal gains. That is not a structure, though, it is a decision about where to live, and the country of residence will normally tax instead. When someone becomes resident is covered in the guide to tax residency, and what non-dom status actually covers in the guide to non-dom.
Losses: only against crypto gains, only in the same year
The loss rule is stricter than anything else in Cyprus tax law:
- set-off only against gains on disposals of crypto-assets,
- only within the same tax year,
- no carry-forward into later years.
For comparison: a company’s general loss carry-forward has run for seven years since 2026. Realise losses in December and gains in January and there is no connection between the two.
Crypto-asset: the definition comes from the EU regulation
The statute does not define the term itself. It refers to EU Regulation 2023/1114, that is, to MiCA. This is a deliberate choice and a good one: instead of a separate Cyprus definition sitting beside the European one and eventually drifting from it, the same definition applies as in financial supervision.
In practice: what is a crypto-asset for regulatory purposes is one for tax purposes too.
What we could not confirm
Whether Article 20E also applies to companies. The sources diverge. Several analyses read the provision as applying to any person, so that a Cyprus company pays 8 % on disposal gains and those gains are ring-fenced from the 15 % base. Another source limits the provision to individuals. We have not been able to read the wording of Article 20E in an official consolidated text, and we are therefore presenting the point as open.
If a decision of yours turns on that question, it is one for someone who puts their name under the answer: Cyprus setup from one place.
Records: every swap has to be captured
The tax is simple, the record-keeping is not. Applying 8 % to a gain is a multiplication. Knowing the gain requires every swap to be recorded with date, quantity and value, including the ones where no money moved.
With data import, movements arrive as a file instead of being typed in one by one. Banking keeps the cash side alongside, and reports show both over the same period. The point is not the arithmetic at the end, it is that the transaction appears in the books at all.
Which other rates the reform moved is in the guide to the 2026 tax reform; the new corporate rate is in the guide to corporate tax.