Crypto Loss Carryforward in Germany: What Happens to Old Losses Under the 2027 Tax Plan

A crypto loss carryforward is the part of your losses from crypto sales that the tax office has formally assessed at year-end because it could not be offset in the same year. It does not sit in your account or in your app but in a notice of its own, and it can only be set against one very particular kind of gain. If you have realised losses during the current year, you should therefore keep two things apart: how much loss arose, and what that loss may actually be set against later. The question is gaining weight right now. In September 2026 the Federal Ministry of Finance circulated a draft bill that would assign gains from crypto assets to income from capital assets from 2027 onwards and tax them at a flat 25 percent. Existing holdings are to remain under the current system. It is precisely at that seam that the fate of an assessed loss carryforward is decided: whether it still finds a counterpart. The market provides the occasion: Bitcoin traded at 75,887 US dollars at around 07:00 UTC on September 16, 2026, roughly 1.7 percent below the previous day (source: CoinGecko price query, retrieved by us). Crypto loss carryforward: what the term in your tax notice means In Germany, gains and losses from selling crypto assets within a year of purchase fall under private disposal transactions in section 23 of the Income Tax Act. In its judgment of February 14, 2023 (case number IX R 3/22), the Federal Fiscal Court confirmed that Bitcoin, Ether and Monero are other economic assets within the meaning of that provision. The same logic therefore applies to them as to gold, collectibles or foreign currency balances. A private disposal transaction is a sale in which no more than one year lies between acquisition and disposal. A loss carryforward is the amount of unrelieved negative income that the tax office assesses separately as at December 31 of a year so that it can still be used in later years. Together, the two produce the situation at issue here: you can hold a loss that exists for tax purposes without it doing anything for you the following year. Why the carryforward does not arise automatically The assessment does not happen by itself. It requires the losses to have been declared in your tax return, as a rule in Annex SO. Anyone who did not report their sales at all, because the bottom line was negative anyway, frequently has no assessed carryforward either. If you never declared your sales, you can make that good through Annex SO for the year in question, provided the year is still open under procedural rules.