Crypto tax in Canada: the 2026 checklist before you file

Crypto tax in Canada comes down to one question the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) asks about every coin you touched last year: did you dispose of it? If you sold, swapped, spent or gave away crypto in 2025, this checklist walks through what the CRA expects before the April 30, 2026 deadline, with every rule linked to the page it comes from and the date we read it.

It is written for the Canadian who bought on a Canadian platform in 2021 or 2024, has a gain or a loss sitting in an app, and would rather do this right than guess. Four numbers do most of the work.

Is crypto taxable in Canada? Yes, when you dispose of it

The CRA’s opening line is plain: “Activities related to crypto-assets often have tax implications.” The trigger is a disposition, which the CRA defines as “usually an event or transaction where you give up possession, control, and all other aspects of property ownership.” For crypto, the CRA lists three ways that happens:

• Trading or exchanging it for government-issued currency or for another type of crypto-asset. Swapping bitcoin for ether is a disposition of the bitcoin, even though no dollars changed hands.
• Using it to buy goods or services. The CRA treats this as a barter transaction.
• Transferring ownership by gift or donation.

Buying crypto with Canadian dollars and holding it is not on that list. Moving coins between wallets you control is not a change of ownership either. The bill arrives when the coins leave your hands.

Where does it go on the return? The CRA’s tax tip points crypto users to the Schedule 3 section headed “Bonds, debentures, promissory notes, crypto-assets, and other similar properties”, and the Schedule 3 instructions say to enter your total proceeds on line 15200 and the total gain or loss on line 15301. Everything is in Canadian dollars at the time of each transaction. The CRA says it will accept a crypto-asset’s fair market value at the time a trade is made, and its valuation page adds the rule that trips people up: “Whichever method you choose, use it consistently from year to year and keep a record of how it was used.”

Capital gain or business income: the question that sets your bill

The same sale can be taxed two very different ways. The CRA puts it this way: “Based on your crypto-asset activities, you may realize business income (or loss) or capital gain (or loss). Business income (or loss) and capital gain (or loss) are reported differently.”

If it is a capital gain, “you must include half of your capital gains (known as taxable capital gains) in your income for the year.” That half is added to your other income and taxed with it. If the CRA decides your activity is a business, the profit is business income and the half rule does not apply.

Which one are you? The CRA says income is generally business income “when your crypto-asset activities are consistent with those of a person carrying on a business” and lists six signs it looks for:

• Frequency of transactions: a history of extensive buying and selling.
• Period of ownership: short holds, turned over quickly.
• Knowledge of crypto-asset markets.
• Time spent: a substantial part of your time studying the markets.
• Financing: buying with borrowed money.
• Advertising that you are willing to buy crypto-assets.

None of these alone decides it, and the courts weigh the same factors. On December 9, 2025 the Tax Court of Canada ruled in Amicarelli v. The King (2025 TCC 185) that a QuadrigaCX customer who bought bitcoin frequently in 2017, funded it with RRSP withdrawals, a second mortgage and credit-card advances, and watched the market daily was carrying on “an adventure or concern in the nature of trade”, according to the law firm that argued the case. Her loss when the exchange emptied her account was therefore a business loss, deductible against other income, rather than a capital loss. The same logic cuts the other way: had she made money, all of it would have been taxable, not half.

A note on the inclusion rate, because a lot of 2024 headlines are still floating around. The federal government proposed in 2024 to raise the inclusion rate from one-half to two-thirds on individual gains above C$250,000. On January 31, 2025 the CRA said it had reverted to administering “the currently enacted capital gains inclusion rate of one-half”, and on March 21, 2025 the Prime Minister’s Office announced that the government “will cancel the proposed hike in the capital gains inclusion rate.” When we read the CRA’s crypto page on September 4, 2026, it still said half. If a calculator or a US site tells you otherwise, close the tab.

Losses work the same way in reverse. You can “deduct half of your capital losses (known as allowable capital losses), but only against your taxable capital gain”, not against your salary. A 2025 net capital loss can be carried back to 2022, 2023 and 2024, or forward to any future year.

Adjusted cost base and the superficial loss rule

Every gain or loss is the difference between what you got and your adjusted cost base (ACB), which the CRA defines as “usually the cost of a property plus any expenses to acquire it, such as commissions and legal fees.” Trading fees count. The part that surprises people is averaging: for identical property bought at different prices, “you have to calculate the average cost of each property in the group at the time of each purchase to determine the adjusted cost base (ACB).” You do not get to pick which bitcoin you sold. Every bitcoin you own has the same ACB.

A made-up example with round numbers:

• You buy 0.5 BTC for C$30,000 in 2024 and another 0.5 BTC for C$50,000 in 2025, fees included. Total cost C$80,000 for 1 BTC, so the ACB is C$80,000 per BTC.
• You sell 0.25 BTC for C$25,000. The ACB of what you sold is 0.25 × C$80,000 = C$20,000.
• Capital gain: C$25,000 minus C$20,000 = C$5,000. Taxable capital gain: C$2,500, which goes on your return.
• The ACB of the 0.75 BTC you still hold stays at C$80,000 per BTC.

Now the rule most people have never heard of. A superficial loss happens, in the CRA’s words, when you sell capital property at a loss and both of these are true: “You, or a person affiliated with you, buys, or has a right to buy, the same or identical property (called ‘substituted property’) during the period starting 30 calendar days before the sale and ending 30 calendar days after the sale”, and you or that person “still owns, or has a right to buy, the substituted property 30 calendar days after the sale.” Affiliated persons include your spouse or common-law partner and a corporation you control. A superficial loss cannot be deducted for the year; instead, if you bought the replacement, you can “usually add the amount of the superficial loss to the adjusted cost base of the substituted property.”

The CRA’s crypto pages are silent on the rule, which means they do not exempt coins from it. The definition covers any capital property, and Toronto tax firm Rosen & Associates says plainly that the superficial loss rules “apply to crypto just like stocks”. The practical version: selling bitcoin at a loss on December 20 to book the loss, then buying it back on January 5, gets you a denied loss and a higher ACB, not a deduction. Selling ether at a loss and buying bitcoin is a different property and is not caught.

T1135: when your crypto counts as foreign property

Form T1135, the Foreign Income Verification Statement, must be filed by Canadian residents who, “at any time during the year, own specified foreign property costing more than $100,000.” Three things about that sentence matter for crypto:

• The threshold is measured by cost amount, which “generally is the adjusted cost base and not the fair market value”. A C$60,000 stack that grew to C$150,000 does not cross it on its own.
• “At any time during the year” means a single day over the line counts.
• Specified foreign property includes “funds or intangible property (patents, copyrights, etc.) situated, deposited or held outside Canada”, along with foreign shares, foreign bank accounts and foreign real estate. It all adds up together.

Is crypto foreign property? According to a November 2025 review in the Canadian Tax Foundation’s newsletter, the CRA said in a 2015 technical interpretation that crypto rights are intangible property, said in 2022 that where crypto is “located, deposited or held” was still under review, and said in 2023 that cryptoassets held by “regulated, Canadian-resident crypto trading platforms for Canadian residents are generally not specified foreign property.” Coins on an offshore exchange are the grey zone, and the authors note that practitioners tend to “err on the side of disclosure.” Between C$100,000 and C$250,000 you can use the simplified Part A; at C$250,000 or more you need the detailed Part B. The form is due with your return, and filing it late costs C$25 a day for up to 100 days, minimum C$100 and maximum C$2,500.

TFSAs, RRSPs and the bitcoin ETF question

Can you shelter crypto in a registered plan? Not the coins. The CRA’s folio on qualified investments is direct: “Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins, are not considered to be money issued by a government of a country and are not qualified investments.” The penalty for getting this wrong is steep: a registered plan that acquires a non-qualified investment leaves its holder with a tax equal to 50 percent of the property’s fair market value at the time it goes in.

The ETF is the door. The same folio says that, apart from certain derivatives, “any security that is listed on a designated stock exchange” is a qualified investment, and names ETF units among them. The Department of Finance’s list of designated exchanges includes the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture, the Canadian Securities Exchange and Cboe Canada. Spot bitcoin ETFs have traded on the TSX since February 18, 2021. So a bitcoin ETF listed on the TSX can sit in a TFSA or RRSP; bitcoin in a wallet cannot. The trade-off is that you hold fund units, not coins, and the fund’s fees and custody arrangements are set out in its prospectus, which is worth reading before you buy. We covered the regulatory path that got Canada here in 3iQ’s 2019 fight with the OSC.

Exchange failures and unreported years

Canadians have been through QuadrigaCX and FTX, so this section earns its place. When a platform fails, the CRA’s answer on whether you can claim the loss is “it depends,” and what it depends on is the platform’s terms of service. In its November 2023 answers to the APFF tax practitioners’ roundtable, summarized by the tax-law site Crypto Tax Lawyer, the CRA distinguished an exchange that holds your crypto “as a custodian for the benefit of the taxpayer,” where the loss is yours, from an exchange whose terms let it pledge, sell, stake or lend your coins, where the exchange owns the coins and you hold a contractual claim against it. In the second case the loss belongs to the exchange first, and your position is that of a creditor whose claim may or may not be collectible. Keep the terms you agreed to, your account records, your proof of claim with the trustee and any recovery you receive; the CRA said that kind of paper is what it will want to see.

Which brings us to records, the thing the CRA repeats most often.

If you use crypto-asset exchanges or other custodial platforms, regularly export a history of your activity to make sure you have adequate books and records in case the exchange ceases operating, stops offering services in Canada, or you lose access to your account. Canada Revenue Agency, "Keeping books and records of crypto-assets for tax filing", page dated November 10, 2025, read September 4, 2026

The CRA’s list of what to keep is specific: the number of units and type of crypto-asset for each transaction, the date and time, the value in Canadian dollars at the time, a description of the transaction and the other party, the wallet addresses you used, and the beginning and ending balance (with cost) of each crypto-asset for each year. From exchanges, it wants trade ledgers and transfer ledgers. And it wants them for “at least six years from the end of the last taxation year to which the records and books of account relate.”

If you have unreported years, the Voluntary Disclosures Program (VDP) is the CRA’s route back. It “grants relief on a case-by-case basis to taxpayers and registrants who come forward to fix errors or omissions in their tax filings”: relief from penalties and part of the interest, and from prosecution. You still pay the tax. Since October 1, 2025, an unprompted application that qualifies gets “75% relief of the applicable interest and 100% relief of the applicable penalties”; an application made after the CRA has already written to you gets 25 percent interest relief and up to 100 percent penalty relief. The error must be at least one year past its filing due date, and you apply on Form RC199 with the returns, the documents and a payment or payment arrangement.

The window for quietly not reporting is closing anyway. On August 15, 2025 the Department of Finance released draft legislation to implement the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework in Canada, under which crypto platforms report customer transactions to tax authorities, and Budget 2025 confirmed the government intends to proceed “subject to a deferred application date of January 1, 2027.” Our law tracker follows the bill.

The 2026 checklist before you file

The dates first. For the 2025 tax year, the CRA’s deadline to file and to pay is April 30, 2026. If you or your spouse or common-law partner is self-employed, the filing deadline is June 15, 2026, but any balance owing is still due April 30.

Then, in order:

• Export the full transaction history from every platform you used in 2025, and every year before that you have not already saved. Do it now, not in April.
• List every disposition: every sale to dollars, every coin-to-coin swap, every purchase paid in crypto, every gift. Buying and holding does not go on the list.
• Convert each transaction to Canadian dollars at the time it happened, using one method, and write down which method.
• Decide capital or business, using the CRA’s six factors, and keep your reasoning.
• Rebuild your ACB per coin using the average-cost rule, fees included, from your first purchase forward.
• Check the 30-day window around every loss sale, including your spouse’s account, for a superficial loss.
• Add up the cost of everything you hold outside Canada. If it passed C$100,000 on any day, deal with T1135.
• If you hold a bitcoin ETF in a TFSA or RRSP, confirm it is listed on a designated exchange. If coins somehow ended up in a registered account, talk to a professional this week.
• If an exchange failed on you, gather its terms of service, your statements and your claim paperwork before deciding whether and how to claim the loss.
• If there are unreported years, read the VDP pages before the CRA reads your name on a platform’s report.
• Keep everything for six years after the year it relates to.

This is not tax advice, and a guide cannot see your file. If your year involved business-level activity, a failed exchange, a T1135 question or a registered plan mistake, pay a CRA-literate accountant or tax lawyer for an hour; it is cheaper than the alternative. For everything else, the rules above are the rules, they are linked to the pages that say so, and we will update this piece when those pages change. Our law tracker carries the CRA’s crypto guidance and the reporting framework with last-verified dates, and the newsletter will flag anything that moves before April.