Take Ethereum Profits or Wait Out the Holding Period? What the Price Jump Means for Your Tax Bill

If you want to sell Ethereum in Germany, the purchase date decides first and the price only after that. Where the purchase goes back more than a year, the gain stays tax free under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Where it does not, the gain counts towards taxable income and is charged at your personal tax rate. That is precisely why the question raised by the price jump of September 11, 2026, is a calendar question rather than a chart question: which of your units are old enough, and which of those are actually showing a gain? This article works through both, drawing on the text of the law, the guidance issued by the tax authorities and our own analysis of two years of daily Ethereum closing prices. What Happened on September 11 and Why It Turns Into a Tax Question On September 11, 2026, Ether rose to an intraday high of 2,664.81 US dollars on the Kraken exchange. That was the highest level since January 31, 2026, when the price last reached 2,710.35 dollars. Measured by the daily closing prices of the same trading pairs, not a single day in between closed higher. The figures come from Kraken's public OHLC interface, retrieved on September 14, 2026, at 06:40 UTC; they describe trading on this one venue and may differ by a few dollars on other exchanges. Half of that move has since been given back. At the same retrieval time, Ether was quoted at around 2,519 US dollars and 2,179 euros. Anyone who reads the headline about the eight-month high and concludes that their holding now sits at that level is working with a price that existed for only a few hours. For tax purposes the high is irrelevant in any case. What counts is the price at the moment you sell. The trigger came from inflows into the US spot ETFs on Ether. The data service SoSoValue reported net inflows of 216.41 million dollars for September 11, of which 148.82 million went into BlackRock's ETHA fund; the Bitcoin ETFs recorded their fourth consecutive day of outflows on the same date, at a net 13.29 million dollars. These figures are attributable to the data service and were reported on September 12, 2026, among others by Bitcoin.com News in German. A reallocation of institutional money indicates demand. It is no promise of a further price rise. How the market read the level before this move is set out in our analysis of the test of the 200-day moving average at 2,100 dollars from August 19, 2026. How Long Does the Holding Period Run on Ethereum, and When Is a Sale Tax Free? Holding period means the span between the acquisition and the disposal of an asset.