- Best for most people: Koinly, free to try with reports from about £39 ($49) a tax year. Best for privacy: Recap, built in the UK, from £119. Best for catching up on several years at once: Summ, formerly Crypto Tax Calculator, whose £49-plus subscription covers every tax year in one go.
- All three apply HMRC’s actual rules, share pooling included, which most international tax tools bolt on as an afterthought. The differences are price models, privacy and polish, not correctness.
- And one honest option costs nothing: a handful of trades on a single exchange can be worked out by hand with our tax guide, and the free tiers will confirm whether you even owe anything before you spend a penny.
UK crypto tax is genuinely awkward: HMRC treats every trade, swap and sale as a taxable event, pools your costs under rules written for shares, and counts staking rewards as income on arrival. Our crypto tax guide explains the rules; this page compares the software that applies them to your actual history, ahead of the self assessment deadline on 31 January. The timing matters more each year: exchanges now report customer details under international rules, so the era of HMRC not noticing is over, and the job is producing numbers you can stand behind.
Everything below was checked against each company’s own pricing and documentation in September 2026. This page is monetised: sign up to Koinly through the gold link and Koinly pays us a commission at no extra cost to you. Recap and Summ pay us nothing and are recommended anyway, which is the test of whether a comparison is real; the full arrangement is in our affiliate disclosure.
The picks at a glance
| Best for | Tool | Price | The short version | Try it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Most people | Koinly | Free to try, reports from $49 per tax year | Cleanest import, see your gains before paying | Buy |
| Privacy | Recap | From £119 a year | UK-built, data encrypted so only you hold the keys, pays us nothing | Direct from Recap |
| Catching up on past years | Summ | From £49 a year, all tax years included | One subscription covers every year you missed, pays us nothing | Direct from Summ |
| A handful of trades | Your own spreadsheet | Free | One exchange and few trades needs no software at all | Our tax guide |
Best for most people: Koinly
Koinly’s winning move is the order it asks for things: connect your exchanges and wallets with read-only access, watch it rebuild your whole history free of charge, see exactly what you owe, and only then decide whether to pay for the report. The UK output does what HMRC actually requires, share pooling with the same-day and 30-day rules applied, with an audit trail showing how every figure was reached. Plans are per tax year by transaction count, $49 covering 100 transactions and $99 covering 1,000, which suits most people filing for one year. The honest caveats live in our full Koinly review: your imported data needs an evening of reconciling before the numbers deserve trust, and catching up on three unfiled years means buying three plans, which is exactly where the next two tools argue their case.
The link lands on the free tier: import everything and see what you owe for nothing, pay only when you want the report.
Imports your exchange history and produces the capital gains figures in the shape HMRC asks for.
Links marked Ad earn us a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and we chose what to recommend before we chose who to sign up with. How we make money
Best for privacy: Recap
Recap’s pitch is written for people who hesitated at the previous paragraph. It is the UK-built option, designed around HMRC’s rules first rather than adapted to them, and its structural difference is privacy: your data is encrypted on your device and, in Recap’s words, only you hold the keys. For a tool that necessarily sees your complete financial life in crypto, that architecture is worth real money to the right person. The price is the trade-off, £119 a year for up to 5,000 transactions and £219 for unlimited, with no pay-only-when-you-file option. UK accountants recommend it often, it handles the chargeable gains detail well, and we say all this with no commercial relationship: Recap has never paid us a penny.
Best for catching up: Summ
Summ, which renamed itself from Crypto Tax Calculator this year, undercuts the field on one specific and common problem: the person who has never filed and needs several years of reports at once. Its plans are yearly subscriptions from £49 (100 transactions) to £249 (10,000), but each includes unlimited reports for every tax year, so one subscription rebuilds 2022, 2023 and 2024 together, where per-year pricing would triple the bill. handling is strong and there is a proper free start with read-only access. Two caveats: the transaction count spans your whole history, so heavy years push you up a tier, and remember the subscription renews yearly, so cancel after filing if you only needed the catch-up. Summ also pays us nothing.
How we chose
Every price and claim was checked against the maker’s own pages in September 2026, and correctness on UK rules was the entry requirement: a tool that shortcuts share pooling produces confident, wrong numbers, and several international products still do. Beyond that we weighed the free-to-preview model, what happens to your data, and honest fit for the three situations UK holders actually arrive in: filing this year, filing several missed years, or wondering whether they need to file at all. For that last question, start with our tax guide, not a subscription.
Common questions
Do I need tax software at all?
If your year is a few buys and sells on one exchange, no: the exchange’s statement and our guide will get you there by hand. Software earns its fee when history spans platforms, touches or staking, or includes the transfers between your own wallets that manual methods routinely miscount as sales.
Can HMRC actually see my crypto?
Increasingly, yes. UK exchanges have shared customer data for years, and international reporting rules now make collection standard. The realistic assumption is that HMRC knows you hold crypto and will eventually compare that against your returns. Software will not hide anything, and is not for that; it is for getting the numbers right before the letter arrives.
What about losses?
Report them. Registered losses offset future gains indefinitely; unreported ones quietly expire from usefulness. Every tool here computes losses as readily as gains, and a loss-heavy year is arguably when the report is most worth buying.
Software or an accountant?
For most people the software’s report is enough to file self assessment. An accountant earns their fee when the year involves genuine complexity, as a business, large sums, or messes like lost records, and the practical combination is software first, accountant reading the output second. Handing an accountant raw exchange exports costs more than any subscription here.
Prices and claims checked against each company’s own pages in September 2026. This page is updated on a schedule and when something material changes. Koinly pays us a commission on sign-ups through the gold links, which never changes a verdict, in line with our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy; Recap and Summ are recommended with no commercial relationship at all.