Crypto Tax News
The Dutch Box 3 reversal skips crypto: what the 29 September letter actually says
Headlines last week said the Netherlands had scrapped its tax on unsold Bitcoin. We read the cabinet letter they were reporting on. The word crypto does not appear in it. What does appear is a 2027 funding package that raises the deemed return on crypto and cuts the tax-free allowance from 59,357 euros to 30,846 euros.
The letter reported as a crypto tax cut does not mention crypto
On 29 September 2026 the Dutch cabinet sent the Tweede Kamer a letter titled Voorstellen op box 3, koopkracht werkenden en sociale zekerheid, signed by Prime Minister Jetten, Finance Minister Heinen and State Secretary Eerenberg. Within three days it had been reported worldwide as the Netherlands abandoning its plan to tax unsold Bitcoin. We downloaded the letter from the Dutch government open-data portal and searched it. The words crypto, cryptoactiva and bitcoin appear zero times in six pages. What the letter does name, precisely, is the category that moves in 2028: alle financiële instrumenten (onder andere aandelen, obligaties en opties), meaning all financial instruments including shares, bonds and options. Crypto is not on that list, and the letter never says it belongs there.
What the cabinet actually decided
The Netherlands does not currently tax crypto gains at all. It taxes wealth. Box 3 applies a deemed return (forfaitair rendement) to the value of your assets on 1 January and taxes that deemed figure at 36 percent, whether or not you sold anything and whether or not you made money. A replacement system, the Wet werkelijk rendement box 3, would tax actual returns instead, and for liquid assets it would do so on an accrual basis: the annual change in value counts as income even if you never sell. The Tweede Kamer adopted that bill on 12 February 2026. The Eerste Kamer has not voted on it. Its plenary debate took place on 30 June 2026 and the vote was postponed. The 29 September letter responds to the criticism of the accrual mechanism in both chambers by filing a novelle, an amending bill, that moves financial instruments onto a realisation basis from 2028 instead. In the letter’s own words, this brings circa 90 percent of the assets with value development in box 3 under a vermogenswinstbelasting, a tax that falls due when you sell.
Crypto is in the group that waits until 2030
The remaining 10 percent is where crypto lives. The letter says that in 2030 the switch is made to a full vermogenswinstbelasting for the overige vermogensbestanddelen, the remaining asset components, and it does not enumerate them beyond a reference to estates under the Natuurschoonwet. Dutch advisers reading the letter divide on how firm crypto’s position is. Deloitte’s note on the letter states plainly that savings and crypto assets are the categories moving in 2030. Taxence and the Dutch crypto outlet Cryptobenelux both point out that the letter does not name crypto at all, and Cryptobenelux treats the question of whether directly held Bitcoin counts as a financial instrument in the final statutory text as genuinely open. Both readings lead to the same practical answer for the next two filing years, and it is the uncomfortable one: a Dutch investor holding shares and a Dutch investor holding Bitcoin, both sitting on the same paper gain, are on track to be taxed by two different methods in 2028 and 2029.
The 2027 measures that pay for it land on crypto holders
This is the part that did not travel. The reversal costs money, just over 3 billion euros in each of 2028 and 2029 according to the budget table in the letter itself, and the letter says where that money comes from. Two of the three box 3 funding measures hit crypto directly. First, from 2027 the heffingsvrij vermogen, the slice of wealth that is not taxed, goes back to its 2020 level of 30,846 euros per person. For 2026 the Belastingdienst puts it at 59,357 euros per person, so this is close to a halving. Second, the letter raises the forfait for overige bezittingen, the deemed-return category that crypto falls into, by 1.5 percentage points in 2027. The letter gives the increase, not the resulting percentage, because the base figure is reset annually under its own formula. Deloitte puts the 2027 result at 7.87 percent, up from a projected 6.37 percent, and the Dutch real estate publication Vastgoedrealist gives the same 7.87 percent figure. For comparison, the Belastingdienst’s published forfait for this category in 2026 is 6.00 percent.
And one measure that helps, from 2028
From 2028 the letter introduces a heffingsvrij resultaat of 1,000 euros, a tax-free amount of return rather than of capital. The letter illustrates it with savers: someone earning 2 percent interest pays nothing on the first 50,000 euros of savings. Applied to a crypto holding under a 7.5 percent deemed return, 1,000 euros of exempt return shelters roughly 13,000 euros of value, against the 30,846 euros of capital the allowance would have sheltered in 2027. For anyone holding crypto rather than cash, the 2028 exemption is worth considerably less than the allowance it replaces.
None of this is law
Every figure in the two sections above comes from a letter proposing legislation, not from legislation. The underlying bill has passed one chamber and stalled in the other. The novelle has not been drafted into statutory text at the time of writing, and the letter concedes its own timetable is ambitious: it must be adopted by the Eerste Kamer before 31 December for the 2028 start to hold, which is why the cabinet says it will ask the Raad van State for an expedited opinion and asks parliament to run the novelle alongside the Belastingplan. The funding side is already contested. PwC’s note on the novelle is headed with the observation that the Kamer is critical of the funding, and Vastgoedrealist reported on 1 October that the allowance cut lacked a majority while the forfait increase was passing without opposition. A tax measure that needs a Senate majority inside three months, and whose funding is being picked apart in week one, is not something to plan around.
What is in force for the return you are about to file
For tax year 2026, the system is unchanged and it is the one you will file under. Crypto belongs to your box 3 assets. The Belastingdienst’s instruction is to declare the value in economic circulation on 1 January, the peildatum, using the rate on that date from the exchange platform you use. There is no averaging, no 31 December figure, no choice of price source beyond the platform where you hold the coins. The 2026 deemed returns are 1.28 percent for bank deposits, 6.00 percent for investments and other assets (crypto sits here), and 2.70 percent for debts. The heffingsvrij vermogen is 59,357 euros per person and 118,714 euros for a couple with a fiscal partner. The rate on the resulting deemed income is 36 percent. On mining, the Belastingdienst’s own position is that the costs normally exceed the proceeds, so you do not have to declare mining income, unless the profit does exceed the costs, in which case it becomes income from other work or business profit and moves to Box 1.
The counter-proof rule matters more in a bad year than the headlines do
Since the Wet tegenbewijsregeling box 3 came into force, a filer whose actual return was lower than the deemed return can declare the actual figure instead, and from tax year 2025 this runs through the ordinary return in Mijn Belastingdienst rather than a separate form. For crypto the definition of actual return includes unrealised value change, so paper losses count. The number is floored at zero: box 3 has no loss carry-forward, so a year in which your crypto halves gives you a nil return and nil tax, not a deduction against anything else. This is the mechanism that decides your bill in a falling market, and it is the one piece of the current system that already works the way the 2028 bill would. Note the asymmetry: in a rising year the deemed return caps nothing and you pay on the forfait even if you sold nothing, while in a falling year you can elect down to zero. That asymmetry is exactly what the accrual bill was going to remove, by taxing real gains and allowing real losses to be carried forward against later years.
A worked example
Take a single filer with 150,000 euros of crypto on 1 January and no other box 3 assets or debts. For 2026 the taxable base is 150,000 minus the 59,357 euro allowance, so 90,643 euros. The deemed return at 6.00 percent is 5,438.58 euros, and 36 percent of that is 1,957.89 euros of tax. Now hold the same coins, unchanged, into 2027 under the letter’s proposals. The allowance drops to 30,846 euros, so the base becomes 119,154 euros. Take the forfait as the 2026 figure of 6.00 percent plus the 1.5 points the letter specifies, so 7.50 percent: the deemed return is 8,936.55 euros and the tax is 3,217.16 euros. The bill on an unchanged holding has risen by 64 percent. Using the 7.87 percent that Deloitte and Vastgoedrealist calculate for 2027 instead, the tax is 3,375.87 euros, a rise of 72 percent. The two measures contribute almost equally: the allowance cut alone, holding the forfait at 6.00 percent, takes the bill to 2,573.73 euros, and the forfait increase adds the rest. Now suppose the market falls and the holding is worth 135,000 euros on 31 December 2027, with no purchases or sales during the year. The actual return is negative, so under the counter-proof rule it is floored at zero, the elected return is zero, and the tax is zero rather than 3,217.16 euros. That single election is worth more to this filer than everything the 29 September letter does.
What to do now
Three things, none of which depend on how the novelle turns out. Record your holdings at midnight on 1 January, per coin and per platform, with the platform rate you used, because that snapshot is the entire basis of your box 3 assessment and it cannot be reconstructed faithfully in April. Record the 31 December value too, along with every purchase and disposal during the year, because the counter-proof calculation needs the value change corrected for money you put in and took out, and without those flows you cannot prove a low actual return even when you had one. And expect to do this yourself for longer than usual: the letter warns that in the first year of the new system banks will not be able to supply data for the pre-filled return, which tells you how much of the reporting burden the Belastingdienst expects to land on taxpayers. For crypto that was always the case, since no exchange prefills a Dutch return for you.
How Taxxy handles it
Taxxy implements the law in force, which is the deemed-return system, and it does not implement anything from the 29 September letter. Dutch crypto runs through Box 3 with per-year parameters taken from the Belastingdienst: 6.04 percent and 57,000 euros for 2024, 5.88 percent and 57,684 euros for 2025, 6.00 percent and 59,357 euros for 2026, at 36 percent throughout, with crypto placed in the beleggen category rather than the savings category. The peildatum is handled explicitly: when the prior year’s 31 December snapshot is available, that value is used as the 1 January base and the current year-end value is kept separately, and when it is not available Taxxy falls back to the year-end value and marks the output so the report discloses that it did. From tax year 2025 it computes the werkelijk rendement alongside the forfait, defined the way the Belastingdienst defines it (value change including unrealised movement, corrected for purchases and disposals during the year, floored at zero, scaled to the taxable base), and tells you which of the two is lower. That comparison is advisory. Taxxy does not file the tegenbewijs election for you. Capital gains are computed and shown for reference but not taxed, which is the correct Dutch treatment for a private investor. Staking and mining income is reported separately with a deliberately conservative Box 1 estimate at the 37 percent top marginal rate, so treat it as an upper bound rather than your actual bill. Three current limits are worth stating. There are no 2027 or 2028 parameters in the code: the table stops at 2026, and a request for a later year falls back to 2026 with a warning, so the halved allowance and the raised forfait are not modelled. There is no realisation-based engine for Dutch crypto, because there is no Dutch law requiring one. And of the two Dutch report buttons, the Box 3 Full HTML and PDF render is the working one; the separate Crypto Vermogen PDF returns a placeholder because its form template is not bundled.
A note on sources
We reached the authority’s own text for this one. The 29 September 2026 cabinet letter, Voorstellen op box 3, koopkracht werkenden en sociale zekerheid, was downloaded as published on the Dutch government open-data portal open.overheid.nl, and the quoted wording, the 2028 scope of all financial instruments, the circa 90 percent figure, the 2030 date for the remaining asset components, the 30,846 euro allowance from 2027, the 1,000 euro heffingsvrij resultaat from 2028, the 1.5 point forfait increase, the 31 December deadline in the Eerste Kamer, the budget table and the warning about banks not supplying prefill data all come from that document directly, as does our statement that it never mentions crypto. The 2026 and 2025 box 3 percentages and allowances, the 2020 allowance of 30,846 euros, the 1 January peildatum rule and platform rate instruction, and the mining position come from the Belastingdienst’s own pages. The 12 February 2026 Tweede Kamer adoption is confirmed by both the rijksoverheid.nl timeline for the bill and the Eerste Kamer’s file for wetsvoorstel 36.748, which is also our source for the 30 June 2026 debate and the postponed vote. The 7.87 percent figure for the 2027 forfait is not in the cabinet letter and we have attributed it rather than stated it as fact: it comes from Deloitte and Vastgoedrealist, which agree on it. We have left out two numbers for want of a second source: whether the allowance cut currently has a parliamentary majority, which only Vastgoedrealist reported, and any explicit statement that crypto is named in the 2030 group, which Deloitte asserts and which Taxence and Cryptobenelux contradict. Several international outlets reported this story as the Netherlands scrapping a 36 percent tax on unsold crypto; that framing does not survive a reading of the letter, and we have not repeated it. This article is general information, not tax advice. The novelle is a proposal that must clear both chambers before 31 December 2026 and may be amended or fail, so speak to a qualified Dutch belastingadviseur about your own position.