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German Crypto Tax Deadline Hits Tonight as Filing Clock Expires
German crypto holders face tonight's filing deadline with new rules under § 23 EStG. Late filers risk 0.25% monthly penalties starting 1 August.
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The clock runs out tonight for German investors who file their own 2025 income tax returns. Not tomorrow morning, not the first working day of August. The statutory deadline is 31 July 2026 at 24:00, and for crypto holders this particular return carries complications the previous ones did not.
The COVID-era extensions are gone. For the 2025 tax year, the normal rule under § 149 Abs. 2 AO applies again: mandatory filers (Pflichtveranlagung) submit by 31 July of the following year. What counts is the moment your return reaches the Finanzamt. With ELSTER or tax software, it is the successful transmission that matters, not when you started filling it in.
Crypto is not treated like shares here. Coins count as "other assets" under § 23 EStG, which produces the rule that keeps Germany attractive for long-term holders: sell after a holding period of more than twelve months and the gain is tax free, no matter how large it is. The BMF confirmed in its March 2025 letter that staking or lending in the meantime does not extend that period.
Inside the twelve months, it looks different. Most private crypto activity lands in Anlage SO. If your 2025 history is spread across four exchanges, two hardware wallets and a handful of DeFi protocols, reconstructing it manually tonight is not realistic. This is what dedicated tax tooling exists for.
CoinTracking is the option most German filers end up with, for a practical reason: it was built in Germany, in Munich, and has been running since 2012, so the German output is not an afterthought. It generates the Anlage SO as a ready-to-file PDF, and also exports in WISO and SteuerGo formats if you are working inside tax software. FIFO is applied per depot with its Depot Separation setting, which matches how the BMF expects wallet-level calculation to work. Imports cover 400+ exchanges, wallets and blockchains via API, CSV or blockchain address. The engine tags DeFi swaps, staking rewards and NFT trades automatically rather than making you classify each line by hand.