EOFY Crypto Tax Planning Australia: The 12-Month CGT Discount and What to Do Before 30 June

It's late May. EOFY is six weeks away. Your crypto P&L for 2025–26 is roughly fixed but not quite locked, because you've still got a few weeks to make decisions about disposals, holding periods, and loss positions.

This is the window where reasonable tax planning happens — not the dodgy "sell and rebuy to manufacture a loss" kind, which the ATO sees through. The legitimate kind: knowing what your CGT position looks like, identifying which lots are about to cross the 12-month threshold, and deciding with your tax agent what to do about it.

Here's how the 12-month CGT discount actually works, what's worth doing before 30 June, and what isn't.

Update — 12 May 2026: The Federal Government has announced major changes to the CGT discount taking effect from 1 July 2027. The 50% discount discussed below remains fully available for both EOFY 2025-26 and EOFY 2026-27 — nothing about your planning for this 30 June changes. But if you're thinking about disposals in the medium term, the picture beyond mid-2027 looks different. See our dedicated guide: Australia's CGT Reform 2027: What the End of the 50% Discount Means for Crypto Investors.

The 12-month CGT discount, properly explained

The ATO treats crypto as a CGT asset. When you dispose of it — sell, swap, gift, spend, or move between owners — you trigger a CGT event. The gain or loss is the difference between what you paid for that specific lot (cost base) and what you got for it (capital proceeds), both in AUD at the relevant dates.

Then comes the rule that makes EOFY planning worth doing:

If you held the asset for more than 12 months before disposal, you only pay tax on 50% of the capital gain.

That's a 50% discount on the taxable gain, applied at your marginal income tax rate. For someone at the 37% bracket, the effective CGT on a discounted gain is 18.5%. For someone at the top 45% bracket plus Medicare levy, it's 23.5%. Versus 39% / 47% on a short-term gain. The difference is enormous on a meaningful position.

A few sharp edges worth knowing:

• The 12 months is calendar months, not 365 days. Bought 5 July 2024, sold 5 July 2025 — you're short by one day under the ATO's reading. Sell on 6 July 2025 and you're inside the discount.
• "Held" means held by the same legal entity, continuously. Moving crypto between wallets you control doesn't reset the clock. Selling and rebuying does.
• The clock starts at acquisition — when you actually received the crypto, not when you ordered the purchase or when the funds left your bank.
• Each lot is separate. If you bought BTC three times — January 2024, August 2024, March 2025 — and you sell some of it in June 2026, the discount depends on which specific lot you're selling. The default ATO method is FIFO (oldest sold first), but you can use specific identification if your records support it.
• Discount is for individuals and trusts. Companies don't get it. SMSFs get a different rate (33.33% discount, effectively).

Why this matters in May-June specifically

There are usually some lots in a real crypto portfolio that are sitting at month 10 or 11. Disposing of those in May costs you the full short-term gain. Holding for another 4–8 weeks and disposing in July — or just holding indefinitely — qualifies them for the 50% discount.

For someone with a $40,000 unrealised gain on a lot bought in July 2025, that's potentially $7,000+ of avoidable tax if they sell in May instead of waiting four weeks.

Most people don't actually know where their lots sit. Their Koinly might be working, but they haven't sat down with it and asked "which lots am I about to lose discount eligibility on if I sell now, and which are about to qualify?" That's the EOFY planning question.

How to identify lots near the 12-month threshold

If your Koinly is properly configured and reconciled, this is one report. Pull a holdings export at today's date, filter for lots with acquisition dates between approximately 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025, and you're looking at the lots whose discount eligibility is being decided in the next 6 weeks.

Three categories to look at:

1. Lots already past 12 months. Eligible for discount today. If you have unrealised gains here and you were going to sell anyway, doing it before 30 June 2026 books the gain in this financial year — useful if your other income drops next year, painful if it rises.

2. Lots about to cross 12 months in June. The watch list. If you were going to sell, delay until they qualify.

3. Lots that won't cross 12 months until late 2026. Out of scope for EOFY planning. Park them.

The actual work of pulling this report is straightforward if your reconciliation is clean. If your Koinly is showing negative balances, missing cost basis, duplicate transactions, or your wallets aren't all connected — the work isn't pulling the report, it's fixing the data underneath. That's usually the bottleneck.

Tax loss harvesting in Australia: the Part IVA caveat

The other classic EOFY move is realising losses on underwater positions to offset gains elsewhere. Sell the lots you're down on, book the loss, and use it to reduce CGT on lots you're up on.

This works in Australia. There's no equivalent of the UK's 30-day "bed and breakfasting" rule. You can technically sell a crypto position and buy it back the next day, and the loss is allowable.

But there's Part IVA — Australia's general anti-avoidance rule. The ATO can disregard a transaction if its "dominant purpose" was obtaining a tax benefit. The clearer it is that you sold and immediately rebought solely to crystallise a tax loss, the more Part IVA risk you have.

This is not the same as "you can't loss harvest." Australians legitimately loss harvest every EOFY across crypto and other CGT assets. What it means is:

• Don't sell and rebuy in the same minute. That's a red flag.
• Don't sell and rebuy at the same price on the same exchange. Also a red flag.
• Document a non-tax reason if you can. Rebalancing, switching exchanges, consolidating wallets — anything substantive.
• Don't be aggressive. If your loss harvesting is small relative to your portfolio, Part IVA is unlikely to come up. If you're harvesting $200,000 of losses against $200,000 of gains via a sell-and-rebuy that happened within an hour, you should expect questions.

The practical rule of thumb is: if your tax agent is comfortable with what you did and you can explain the trade as something more than just a tax move, you're probably fine. If you can't explain it any other way, sit out.

What's actually worth doing before 30 June

In rough priority order:

1. Get your reconciliation clean. This is the prerequisite for everything else. You can't make timing decisions on lots you can't identify.

2. Run the 12-month threshold report. Know exactly which lots qualify for the discount, which don't, and which are about to.

3. Talk to your tax agent. Bring the data. Ask about deferring or accelerating disposals based on your broader income picture for 2025-26 vs 2026-27.

4. Consider loss harvesting carefully. With Part IVA in mind. With documented non-tax reasons where possible.

5. Don't make giant changes for tax reasons alone. The single most common EOFY mistake is selling something you actually wanted to hold long-term, just to book a discount. The tax saving doesn't recover the upside you missed.

6. Budget for the October bill. Or May 2027 if you're filing via a tax agent. Knowing your CGT position now means knowing your cash requirement. People with six-figure gains who haven't kept cash aside often have to liquidate more to pay tax, triggering more gains, in a loop.

What's not worth doing

• Selling crypto to "lock in" a discount when you weren't planning to sell anyway. You re-enter the market with new cost base and a new 12-month clock. Unless you genuinely don't want the position, you're paying tax to set up future tax.

• Aggressive wash-style loss harvesting. Same-day sell-and-rebuy on the same exchange at the same price is the canonical Part IVA fact pattern. Spend an hour or a different exchange if you must, and document a reason.

• Trying to characterise a long-held position as a "personal use asset" to claim the $10,000 exemption. The ATO is on this. Personal use is narrow — used in normal course to acquire goods or services within a short time of acquisition. A BTC bag held for two years is not personal use, no matter how you spent some of it.

• Doing this in the last 48 hours of June. Exchanges get congested, fees spike, prices move, and any clean execution gets harder. If you're making EOFY moves, decide and execute by mid-June.

What the ATO already knows

The other thing worth knowing in May 2026: the ATO has been running crypto data-matching since 2019 and has records from over 1.2 million accounts on Australian exchanges. They participate in the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), which extends international visibility from 2027. They've sent over 350,000 nudge letters to suspected crypto holders in the last three years.

If you've traded on Independent Reserve, Swyftx, BTC Markets, CoinSpot, or Binance Australia — they have your data. If you've traded on overseas exchanges and never declared anything, they will likely have that data shortly.

This isn't reason to panic. It's reason to file accurately and on time. EOFY planning is part of that, but the bigger thing is making sure your eventual 2025-26 return reports your crypto correctly and matches what they're seeing on their end.

What we can do for you

HandyTax does the reconciliation. We take your exchange CSVs, wallet addresses, DeFi positions, and bot trading history, reconcile everything in Koinly (or fix the Koinly you've got that's showing errors), apply FIFO cost basis, and deliver a CGT report formatted for the ATO.

For EOFY planning specifically, we offer pre-EOFY reports run through your current transaction date so you can see your CGT position before 30 June. After 1 July, we update the report with your closing financial year position at no extra cost — same engagement, two delivery points.

You take the data to your tax agent. They decide what to do with it. We don't do the deciding — that's not our job, that's theirs.

Get a quote for your Australia crypto tax reconciliation →

Or read more about Australia crypto tax for 2026, including how the 12-month discount fits with the rest of your CGT schedule.

EOFY is in six weeks. Get your data sorted now and you can spend the last week of June making decisions, not reconciling spreadsheets.