0 euros in acquisition costs in the crypto tax draft: how to check salary paid in Bitcoin

Anyone who receives their salary in Bitcoin already pays tax on it today: the inflow is employment income and is taxed like a salary paid in euros. The German finance ministry's draft bill on crypto taxation could mean that the same amount enters the calculation a second time on a later sale, because acquisition costs would then have to be set at zero euros. What would be taxable is the entire sale proceeds, not the price gain alone.

This gap is documented, but it remains an interpretation: the point comes from a named tax adviser and relates to a draft that still has to pass the cabinet, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. What you can do about it today, if it affects you, is above all to document. For every inflow you need the euro amount at the moment it arrives together with a chain of evidence, because that record is precisely what will later argue for an acquisition value above zero.

Acquisition costs of zero euros: what the draft bill provides for

The draft moves the taxation of cryptocurrencies out of private disposals and into income from capital, that is from Section 23 to Section 20 of the German Income Tax Act. With that change of regime comes a rule that sounds technical at first glance. According to the account in the professional journal Der Betrieb, exchange crypto assets that arrive "free of charge or in return for services not taxed under the new regime" are to be recognised at acquisition costs of 0 euros.

Acquisition costs are the amount at which a crypto asset enters your tax calculation and which is deducted from the proceeds on a sale. If that figure is zero, there is nothing to deduct. The explanatory memorandum has airdrops and bounties mainly in mind, tokens that arrive in a wallet without any consideration and for which there genuinely is no purchase price. On both accounts, however, the operative text of the law governs only the acquisition costs, not the set of cases it covers.

That opens a gap between intent and wording. The rule is meant for gifted tokens. What the wording captures is every inflow not taxed under the new regime, and work performed is one of them.

How one inflow turns into two taxable events

Crypto as remuneration is no special case in tax terms. If your employer pays part of your wage in Bitcoin, the amount counts as a benefit in kind and therefore as taxable employment income. What governs is the euro value at the moment of the inflow, and wage tax and, as a rule, social security contributions fall due on that value. How this first step works today is set out in detail in our guide to salary paid in Bitcoin and how it is taxed.

The second event comes later. If you keep the coins as a private investment and sell them at some point, that is a taxable event in its own right. Under current law the already taxed inflow value forms the acquisition costs, so that only the increase in value between inflow and sale counts. This principle is why the law as it stands is regarded as internally consistent: every euro is captured exactly once.

If that deduction falls away, the tax base shifts from the price gain to the entire proceeds. The inflow value, on which wage tax has already been paid, enters the calculation a second time. That is what double taxation means here, and it is why the question is not an academic one.

Tax adviser Ingo Heuel's worked example: 50,000 euros of salary in Bitcoin

The gap was flagged by Dr Ingo Heuel, lawyer and tax adviser at the LHP Gruppe and a member of the tax procedure committee of the German Federal Chamber of Tax Advisers. Speaking to Blocktrainer.de, he works the case through on a simple example: an employee receives Bitcoin worth 50,000 euros as salary in 2027.

Those 50,000 euros are employment income first and are taxed as such. If the employee later sells the coins at a profit, the second event follows. If the original 50,000 euros are taken into account as acquisition costs, then at an assumed tax rate of 25 percent a tax of 2,500 euros falls due on the later sale; behind that sits a sale 10,000 euros above the inflow value.

With acquisition costs of zero euros the calculation looks different. Running the same example at the same tax rate, 25 percent applies not to 10,000 but to the full 60,000 euros of proceeds, which is 15,000 euros instead of 2,500 euros. Heuel puts the claim behind it this way: whoever receives 50,000 euros in Bitcoin as salary and already has to record it as employment income ought then to be able to recognise those 50,000 euros as acquisition costs as well. In his assessment it also makes no difference whether income tax was actually paid on the original amount, given personal allowances.

Whom the rule hits and whom Heuel expressly excludes

This is the point at which the case is often told too large, and the tax adviser himself contradicts that. Heuel makes clear to Blocktrainer.de: "The claim that this affects everyone who is paid in Bitcoin does, however, go too far." The sentence matters because it limits the reach of the gap.

Employees holding privately

What is chiefly in view is the employee who receives wages in crypto assets and then holds the coins privately. For that person the inflow is employment income and the later sale a private matter, and the question of acquisition costs sits exactly between those two steps.

Business owners and freelancers

Anyone receiving Bitcoin as business remuneration and holding it as business assets falls under different tax rules in principle, on this account. For that group the zero-euro question does not arise in this form. With commercially earned mining rewards, too, the tax authorities' existing position treats the coins as acquired at market value at the moment of inflow, that is at a value above zero.

Heuel also points out that the exact tax classification of the later sale would have to be assessed separately in each individual case. That qualification belongs to the finding, not as a footnote behind it.

Rent and fees in Bitcoin: the same mechanism

The rule attaches to the concept of a service not taxed under the new regime, and not to the word salary. On the wording, the same mechanism therefore catches other inflows as well. Blocktrainer.de expressly names the case of rent paid in Bitcoin: anyone letting a flat and receiving the rent in cryptocurrencies taxes it as rental income and would face the same question on a later sale.

The same applies to fees that self-employed people receive as private income, to the extent they do not end up as business assets anyway. The logic is the same in every case: an amount already captured as income should not count as a gain a second time on sale.

Inheritance and gifts are in play too. On the analysis in Der Betrieb, the draft as its starting point captures every gratuitous inflow and contains no express continuation rule, meaning no carry-over of the predecessor's acquisition date and acquisition costs. If a Bitcoin acquired up to the end of 2026 is given away or inherited in 2027, the wording could point to new holdings and acquisition costs of 0 euros for the recipient.

Which documents prove an acquisition value above zero euros

There is nothing you can do about a rule that does not yet apply. There is something you can do about missing records, and you need those in either world. Anyone being paid for services in crypto today collects three things for every single inflow: the moment it arrived, the euro equivalent at that moment, and proof that the amount was recorded as income.

• The payslip or invoice showing the euro value recognised for the inflow. For wages that is the payslip; for fees and rent, your own invoice together with the booking.
• The employment contract or the supplementary agreement setting out payment in crypto assets and the agreed conversion date. Without that date it becomes contentious later which rate applies.
• The payment on the blockchain: the wallet address that received the inflow, and the associated transaction, which links the paper record to the coins you later sell.
• The price record for the day of the inflow from a traceable source, so that the euro value remains derivable and is not merely asserted.

This chain can be kept by hand, but it gets more laborious with every further payment. Portfolio and tax tools record inflows as a transaction type of their own and capture the price at the moment of the inflow; our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers shows which providers map that cleanly. What matters is less the tool than completeness: a single unrecorded inflow is later the one case in which you have nothing to produce.

Inflow, holding period, sale: which data belong in your schedule

What counts in the end for the tax return is a schedule that assigns an amount to every event. Three data fields carry that schedule. The inflow date decides between old and new holdings and governs the holding period. The euro value at inflow is the amount you want to claim as acquisition costs. The sale date with proceeds closes the event.

Two mix-ups regularly cost money here. The first: the gross figure an exchange reports is not your gain but the sum of your sales. The second: the exemption limit for private disposals applies to the total gain for a year, not per coin, and it is a limit rather than an allowance that survives being exceeded. What happens when the purchase record is missing we have worked through on the draft itself: a substitute assessment then applies, under which half the sale price is recognised.

That substitute assessment is a different provision from the zero-euro rule and the two are often conflated. The substitute assessment bites when acquisition costs and acquisition date are unknown. The zero-euro rule, by contrast, bites on the wording even when the inflow is impeccably documented, merely because it happened without a purchase price.

The December 31, 2026 cut-off separates old holdings from new

Whether the new system reaches you at all hangs on a date. On the analysis in Der Betrieb, the new substantive rules are to apply for the first time to exchange crypto assets acquired or received after December 31, 2026. Everything that was in your holdings before that stays in the old regime under the draft; for old holdings whose one-year period is still running on January 1, 2027, tax exemption can arise once the existing one-year period expires.

For inflows from work, rent or fees that means: what arrives in 2026 does not fall under the zero-euro rule. What arrives from January 2027 does, on the wording. That makes the turn of the year the real dividing line, and the chain of evidence for the first inflows of the new year especially important.

One particularity concerns income from holdings you have held for a long time. Lending and staking rewards that flow from old holdings after December 31, 2026 count as new holdings under the explanatory memorandum. The old holding itself stays old, its income does not. How the grandfathering was conceived at the previous cut-off is set out in our article on the crypto holding period and its grandfathering.

Withholding tax from 2028: what exchanges will remit in future

The substantive tax rules are to apply from January 1, 2027, but withholding of tax by crypto service providers only from January 1, 2028. For 2027 that means, on the account in Der Betrieb, that gains and income from new holdings will as a rule not yet be taxed at source. In that year you remain responsible yourself for declaring your transactions.

From 2028 service providers will remit the tax, though even then the deduction will not be comprehensive. What becomes decisive is which data your exchange holds about you. If the platform does not know the acquisition costs and acquisition date, it is in principle to be allowed to fall back on your information, provided no contrary data exist. If your figures cannot be recognised, the assumption for the tax deduction is that the coins were acquired after December 31, 2026.

From this follows a practical point that has nothing to do with double taxation and still hangs on the same chain of evidence: anyone who has documented their inflows can pass them to the platform and avoid an excessive deduction. Anyone who has not pays more at first and has to claw the money back through the tax return. Which providers fall into this procedure as regulated houses at all is shown by our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

What is still open: cabinet, Bundestag and Bundesrat

The draft is a ministerial draft, a text from the ministry and not a law. On the analysis in Der Betrieb, the cabinet session and majorities in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat are still required. Our report of October 2 on the cabinet date for the draft bill names October 14 as the date of the cabinet session and October 6 as the end of the consultation period.

Until then the wording of precisely the passage at issue here may change. Heuel intends to bring his point into the technical consultation on the bill through the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisers. Frank Schäffler, a politician of the FDP and a former member of the Bundestag, had also drawn public attention to the problem in early October.

On the scale of the project: the draft expects additional revenue for the state as a whole of 0 euros in 2027 and 160 million euros in 2028. The revenue therefore arrives with the deduction at source, not with the change of regime.

How certain the double taxation really is

Two things should be kept apart. The rule stands in the draft as described and is reported identically by two independent specialist sources: acquisition costs of 0 euros on gratuitous inflows and on tokens received for services not taxed under the new regime. The consequence for salary, rent and fees, by contrast, is an interpretation of the wording, and it is Heuel's reading.

Nobody claims the double taxation would be intended. The explanatory memorandum names airdrops and bounties and describes a shift of taxation to the later disposal. The operative text, by contrast, governs only the acquisition costs, and on Heuel's view that is where the real problem lies. A drafting oversight is as conceivable as a deliberate decision.

For you that means: no panic, but no waiting on the records either. How a tax office decides an individual case stands in no draft, and nobody can promise it. Whether Bitcoin, Ethereum or another crypto asset flows in changes nothing about the system. With larger amounts from work, letting or fees the case belongs with a tax adviser in any event, who will make the classification for your situation.

Crypto salary and double taxation: What to take away

For inflows without a purchase price the draft sets acquisition costs at zero. If that also catches wages, rent and fees, the entire proceeds are taxed on sale and not merely the price gain. You can make your position provable today:

1. Build a chain of evidence for every inflow. Payslip or invoice, the contract with the conversion date, the transaction and the price record for the day of the inflow belong together in one file. A tool from our comparison of crypto tax software captures the price at the moment of inflow automatically.
2. Keep inflows from January 2027 separate. What arrives after December 31, 2026 falls into the new system under the draft. If your coins sit with a regulated house, you can lodge the data there later; which providers belong to that group is set out in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Think custody and proof together. Anyone moving coins from their salary to their own wallet carries the transaction along, so that the path from inflow to sale stays traceable. Which devices are suited to that is shown by our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 2, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)