Germany's Crypto Holding Period: What Happens Now Signing for Petition 201716 Closed on September 15

The signature period for German parliamentary petition 201716 closes on September 15, 2026. What ends on that day is the option to sign the petition online. Nothing more. It is not a tax deadline, not a selling date and not a cut-off by which you would have to change anything about your holdings in Bitcoin or other crypto assets. Anyone who has read the headlines about the end of the holding period over the past few weeks can easily mix up two completely different dates. This article separates them.

The petition carrying ID number 201716 is titled “Preservation of the tax holding period for private disposals of crypto assets” and dates from May 30, 2026. The submission asks that the one-year holding period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG) remain in place and that crypto assets continue to be classified as “other assets”. On September 7, 2026, the counter on the official petition page stood at 43,361 online signatures, the status at “in signature collection”, the field “quorum reached” at “yes” and the remaining time at eight days. The petition’s discussion forum held 107 threads at that point.

What Really Ends on September 15, 2026 for Petition 201716

A signature period is the window in which a published petition can be supported electronically on the Petitions Committee platform and debated in the forum. Once it expires, precisely what item 10 of the guideline on handling public petitions describes takes place: the petition is closed to further signatures and to discussion contributions, and it is then processed under the general procedural principles for petitions.

For you as an investor, that means three things. The signature button disappears. The forum stops accepting new posts. And the actual parliamentary procedure only begins afterwards. The day changes nothing about the tax situation, because a petition is not a law and does not set one in motion.

Six Weeks of Signature Time, and a Timeline That Ends at 01:00 UTC

Item 8 of the same guideline sets the length: the signature period runs for six weeks. The clock starts when the petition is published, not on the day it is submitted. In the case of 201716, three and a half months lie between the submission on May 30 and the deadline on September 15, which makes many readers pause. The explanation sits in the parameters the petition page stores for its progress chart: the timeline of the signature count begins on August 4, 2026 at 01:00 UTC and ends on September 15, 2026 at 01:00 UTC. That is exactly 42 days, precisely the six weeks set out in the guideline. The petition was therefore published in early August, and the months before that were taken up by the preliminary review.

One practical point follows from those parameters, and nobody in the German-language coverage has spelled it out so far. In September, 01:00 UTC corresponds to 03:00 Central European Summer Time. Anyone who notes September 15 as the date and then sits down to sign in the evening may find the door already shut. So do not rely on the stated end date; sign by September 14 at the latest. A day of buffer costs nothing and is the only protection against a deadline whose exact time the committee states nowhere in plain words.

Quorum Reached: What 30,000 Signatures Trigger in the Petition Procedure

The quorum is the number of endorsements at which a public petition reaches an additional stage of treatment. Since July 1, 2024 it has stood at 30,000 signatures; before that it was 50,000. In the same move, the Petitions Committee extended the signature period from four weeks to six. Petition 201716 has cleared that threshold by more than 44 percent with 43,361 endorsements, and it did so within the running deadline. That is what counts.

The Petitions Committee service page states the legal consequence as follows: if a petition has reached the quorum of 30,000 endorsements within the signature period, the petitioner is as a rule invited to a public committee hearing. The reference points to item 8.4.4 of the procedural principles. “As a rule” is administrative language and means: normally, but not necessarily. Item 11 of the guideline says explicitly that the committee decides in the course of the parliamentary review whether a public deliberation or a hearing of petitioners is to be held.

No date for such a session could be found while researching this article, and that is normal: it is scheduled only once the signature period has closed and the committee has prepared the case. If you read anywhere that the hearing has already been scheduled, ask for the source.

How the Procedure Continues After the Signature Period

Once the deadline passes, 201716 moves into the regular review procedure of the Petitions Committee. The sequence is laid down in the procedural principles and runs in several stages: as a rule the committee obtains a statement from the competent federal ministry, here the Federal Ministry of Finance. A pair of rapporteurs from two parliamentary groups assesses the case. The committee then adopts a recommendation for a decision, meaning a proposal to the plenary on how to deal with the request. The Bundestag plenary votes on it, and the petitioner receives a reasoned notice.

Item 12 of the guideline records that the public is informed online about the outcome of the petition procedure. Completed petitions appear in a dedicated section of the platform for that purpose. When 201716 will reach that stage cannot be predicted with any seriousness. Petition procedures on questions of tax policy principle often drag on for months, because the ministerial statement has to be awaited and the committee runs many cases in parallel.

What the Number of Supporters Achieves in the Procedure, and What It Does Not

The Bundestag answers that question in its own help text with remarkable sobriety: the number of endorsements does not, in principle, affect the parliamentary review of a petition. The right to petition under Article 17 of the Basic Law belongs to every single person, and a submission without a single co-signature is examined by the same standards as one with 43,000. What the high number does achieve is the public hearing and the political visibility. No binding effect on the legislature arises from it. Anyone who reads the petition as a referendum on the holding period overestimates the instrument.

Do I Have to Sell Bitcoin Before September 15?

No. There is currently no cut-off date by which a private investor would have to have sold in order to secure the tax exemption after one year of holding. September 15 is a signature deadline in a petition procedure and has no point of contact with income tax law. The mix-up is nevertheless easy to make, because both topics have appeared in the same headlines since the summer and some of those headlines talk about a “tax shock”.

A second reason for the error: a cabinet decision sounds final. It is not. How the path from announcement to applicable law actually runs is set out further down in this article. Our earlier assessment of the situation in August helps here, placing the cabinet decision of July 6, 2026 and the petition side by side: Germany’s crypto holding period faces abolition.

The One-Year Holding Period Under Section 23 EStG: What the Law Says Today

The holding period is the span between the acquisition and the disposal of an asset within which a gain is taxable. Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the Income Tax Act covers “disposals of other assets where the period between acquisition and disposal is no more than one year”. According to the tax administration and the case law, crypto assets fall under those “other assets”. Anyone who holds for longer than a year and then sells does not generate a taxable private disposal transaction from that sale.

That wording stands unchanged in the statutory text on September 7, 2026, as a retrieval of the official version at gesetze-im-internet.de shows. This is the most reliable sentence in the whole article: as long as an amendment has not been promulgated as law, the printed text applies. Government bills, key-issues papers and budget accompanying documents change nothing about that.

The 1,000 Euro Exemption Threshold and the FIFO Rule

Two details often decide more in practice than the period itself. First the exemption threshold: under Section 23 (3) sentence 5 EStG, gains remain tax free if the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. Threshold means that at 1,000 euros and above the full amount becomes taxable, not only the excess. An allowance would work differently.

Second, the allocation of the units sold. If you have bought the same cryptocurrency several times at different points in time, it has to be established which units you are selling. In practice the calculation mostly follows the “first in, first out” principle, FIFO for short: the units acquired first count as the ones disposed of first. For foreign currency amounts, Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 3 EStG even prescribes that order explicitly. If you buy across several exchanges and wallets, you need a clean data basis for it. That is exactly where the common tax and tracking tools come in, and we also cover their export functions in our crypto exchange comparison.

The Ten-Year Period for Staking and Lending: Why It Does Not Apply to Crypto Assets

The law contains an extension that unsettles many investors. Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 EStG provides that the period increases to ten years if income is generated from the use of the asset as a source of income in at least one calendar year. Applied to crypto assets, that would be the case as soon as somebody lends coins or puts them into staking.

The tax administration has explicitly rejected precisely that application. The Federal Ministry of Finance circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets, dated March 6, 2025, states that for virtual currencies the extension of the disposal period under Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 sentence 4 EStG does not apply. So staking or lending does not cost you the one-year period for the coins involved. The ongoing yields from staking and lending are unaffected by this and are recorded as other income; that is a separate matter from the holding period.

What a Cabinet Decision Is, and Why It Is Not Yet Tax Law

A cabinet decision is the federal government agreeing on a bill it intends to introduce into the parliamentary procedure. What follows is the first reading in the Bundestag, deliberation in the specialist committees, frequently an expert hearing, second and third readings, the passage through the Bundesrat and finally the execution and promulgation in the Federal Law Gazette. Only with promulgation and the date of entry into force named in it does the project become applicable law. Along that path, bills are regularly amended, split, postponed or dropped.

Reporting on the crypto holding period is currently inconsistent, and you should know that before taking any headline at face value. Some outlets reported the abolition over the summer as a done deal, others demonstrated that it does not appear in the ongoing tax legislative procedure at all. Our own analysis of the government bill for the 2027 Income Tax Reform Act, published on September 7, 2026 under the title “The crypto holding period stays”, concluded that crypto assets are not regulated in it. That assessment is our own and does not replace independent confirmation. The only reliable authority remains the statutory text, and today it carries the one-year period.

Grandfathering for Existing Holdings: The Open Question the Petition Does Not Settle Either

Grandfathering means, in tax law, that a new rule spares investments already held and applies only to those acquired later. In earlier reforms of this kind that was not a given. When the legislature introduced the flat-rate withholding tax in 2009, securities in private assets acquired before the cut-off date were exempted from the new taxation of price gains. Whether a reform of crypto taxation would proceed similarly is open; the petition calls for the rule to be preserved as a whole and says nothing about a transitional solution.

What follows from that is a stance, not an action. Anyone who has documented their acquisition data cleanly can respond to any conceivable transitional arrangement. Anyone who has not is at a disadvantage even under the friendliest variant, because they cannot prove their own holding period. In tax matters the burden of proof lies with the taxpayer.

Documenting Acquisition Data and Transaction History

This preparation is worthwhile regardless of how the petition turns out and whether a reform arrives. What you need for each acquisition is the date, the time, the quantity, the price in euros and the counter currency, plus the fees and the platform. For transfers between your own wallets, the transaction identifiers are added, so that a transfer is not later misread as a sale.

In practical terms: export the complete transaction history from every exchange you use and store it outside the platform. Exchanges switch off trading pairs, change export formats or disappear entirely; the history is then gone, in case of doubt. It becomes particularly laborious with running savings plans, because there every single instalment starts its own holding period and therefore creates its own record.

Signing Petition 201716: Account, Postal Route and Deadline

Signing runs through a free user account on the Petitions Committee platform. If you do not want to create an account, you can also support a petition by post; for that the committee requires the exact designation of the petition with its ID number and subject. The postal route also has to arrive within the signature period, which makes it a tight affair eight days before the deadline.

Three points that are frequently overlooked: a signature is not an anonymous one, but requires registration with name and address; on request, only a standardised pseudonym and the date are published. A signature already given can be withdrawn. And participation in the forum is separate from signing; a discussion post alone does not count as an endorsement.

Common Misconceptions About the Holding Period and the Petition

“After September 15 the holding period is gone.” Wrong. The signature period ends on that day, nothing else. The one-year period stands in the law afterwards just as it did before.

“43,000 signatures force the Bundestag into a decision.” Wrong. The signatures normally lead to a public hearing of the petitioner. No substantive binding effect arises, and the Bundestag has its own help text saying exactly that.

“If I have staked, the ten-year period applies to me.” Wrong, at least under the current administrative view. The Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 does not apply the extension to crypto assets.

“Below 1,000 euros in gains I do not have to declare anything at all.” Careful. The exemption threshold makes the gain tax free but does not automatically release you from the duty to declare, and it applies to all private disposal transactions in a year taken together, not per coin.

This overview does not replace tax advice. For the treatment of a specific case, particularly with foreign accounts, commercial trading or larger amounts, a tax adviser should be brought in.

The Crypto Holding Period and Petition 201716: What to Take Away

1. Keep the two dates apart. September 15, 2026 is the signature deadline for the petition, not a tax cut-off. If you want to sign, do it by September 14 at the latest, because the timeline stored on the petition page already ends at 01:00 UTC on September 15. What actually applies in tax terms today is set out along the concrete calculation steps in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.
2. Secure your acquisition data before you sell anything. Pull the complete transaction history from every platform you use and store it externally. Which trading venues deliver usable exports and tax reports is set out in the exchange comparison.
3. Decide on custody separately from the tax question. A long holding period and an exchange that switches off trading pairs are a poor match. If you intend to hold for years, review the options in the hardware wallet comparison and keep the acquisition records all the same.

Sources: The figures and quotations on the procedure come from the official petition page of the German Bundestag on Petition 201716 and from the guideline for the handling of public petitions. The statutory wording follows the official version of Section 23 EStG at gesetze-im-internet.de, and the statement on the ten-year period follows the Federal Ministry of Finance circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets dated March 6, 2025.

(As of September 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)