Getting your money out of crypto

• Cashing out to your bank is usually free and near-instant: Coinbase charges nothing for a Faster Payments withdrawal, Kraken £1.95, but first-time and card-funded withdrawals often sit in 72-hour holds.
• Withdrawing coins to your own wallet above about €1,000 in value triggers a legal ownership check: expect to self-certify or send a tiny “Satoshi test” payment. It’s the law, not the exchange being difficult.
• No legitimate platform ever asks you to pay a separate fee to release your own money. That request, wherever it appears, is a scam.

Money goes into crypto easily. It comes out through two doors: back to pounds in your bank account, or out to a wallet you control. And both doors have rules on them that nobody reads until the moment they’re stuck mid-withdrawal, wondering if their money is gone. It almost never is. It is sitting in a hold, or waiting for a check that has a name and a legal basis and a predictable end.

This guide walks both exits: what cashing out actually costs and how long it takes platform by platform, why withdrawals get held and for exactly how long, the identity checks the law now attaches to wallet withdrawals, and the scams that specifically hunt people on their way out. Fees and rules were checked against the platforms’ own pages and the legislation in August 2026. Education, not advice; nothing sold on this page.

Cashing out to pounds

The good news first: for UK users, turning crypto into money in your bank account is cheap and fast by any normal standard.

One universal rule: the receiving bank account must be in your own name. Exchanges reject third-party withdrawals as an anti-money-laundering matter, so the round trip is always you-to-exchange-to-you. And if the money arriving at your bank triggers questions, that’s the bank’s side of the story: our UK banks guide covers it, and the short version is: keep your exchange statements, answer honestly, and note that even the crypto-hostile banks (Chase, Metro Bank) state on their own pages that incoming money from exchanges is accepted.

Why your withdrawal is on hold

Holds are the number one source of “is my money gone?” panic, and they are almost all published policy with fixed durations. Kraken’s, which it documents in unusual detail, is representative: your first purchase with any new card (including Apple Pay and Google Pay) puts a 72-hour hold on the purchased amount; every PayPal purchase carries a 72-hour hold; a first-ever bank deposit can trigger one; and changing your password holds withdrawals to new addresses for 24 hours, a security feature, since the classic account-takeover move is to change the password and drain the account somewhere new.

Three things make holds painless. They restrict withdrawal, not trading: held funds can still be used to trade. They apply to the deposited or purchased amount, not your whole balance. And they are avoidable: fund by bank transfer rather than card or PayPal and most of them never start. If you know you’ll want to move coins out on a schedule, do the buying at least three days earlier.

Withdrawing coins to your own wallet

Since September 2023, UK money-laundering law (the “travel rule”) requires exchanges to attach sender and recipient information to crypto transfers, and to check who owns a private wallet before releasing coins to it, once the transfer is worth roughly €1,000 or more (the legal threshold is set in euros). This is why your exchange suddenly wants to know whose wallet you’re withdrawing to. It is not optional for them, and answering honestly costs you nothing: withdrawing to your own wallet is completely legal.

In practice you’ll meet one of two checks. The simple one is self-certification: tick a box, confirm with two-factor, done. The thorough one is the Satoshi test: the exchange gives you an exact, oddly specific amount and a window (Kraken allows 180 minutes) to send it from the wallet you’re claiming, proving you hold its keys; some platforms accept a signed message instead. Once a wallet address passes, it is whitelisted and future withdrawals to it skip the ceremony, which is a genuinely good reason to use your exchange’s address book rather than pasting addresses fresh each time.

The mechanics of the withdrawal itself are cheap right now: network fees are usually pennies to a pound or so, but check a fee estimator before you send (they spike when the network is busy), though exchanges’ own flat withdrawal fees often exceed the network’s. The dangers are all self-inflicted, and all permanent: the wrong network (sending coins over a network the receiving wallet doesn’t support; Revolut’s help pages state flatly that such funds cannot be retrieved), the wrong address, and skipping the test send. Send a small amount first, confirm it arrives, then send the rest, and re-check the full address on the second send too, not just the first and last characters.

The scams that live at the exit

Cashing out is where scammers concentrate, because it’s the one moment people will pay to make a problem go away.

The unlock fee. A platform (usually a fake one, sometimes a hijacked account on a real one) shows you a healthy balance and requires a “withdrawal fee”, “tax” or “compliance charge” paid separately before releasing it. Then another. Real exchanges deduct fees from the money they’re sending; none, ever, require a separate payment to release your own funds. The visible balance is the bait; the fees are the scam; the money was never coming.

Fake support. Search ads, X replies and phone calls impersonating exchange support prey on people mid-withdrawal-problem. Real support lives inside the app or site you already use. Nobody legitimate cold-calls you about a stuck withdrawal, and nobody legitimate ever asks for your seed phrase: that request is the whole scam in four words.

Address poisoning. Scammers send dust transactions from addresses crafted to look like yours (matching first and last characters) so that when you copy an address from your transaction history, you copy theirs. One victim lost $50m to this in a single transaction in December 2025. Defences: never copy addresses from history, use the whitelist/address book, and verify the middle of the address, not just the ends.

Common questions

How long until the money is actually in my bank?

Once a withdrawal clears the exchange, Faster Payments delivery is typically minutes. The honest full answer for a first-timer is “minutes to three days”: a first withdrawal can meet a hold, an ownership check or your bank’s inbound screening. Plan the first one when nothing depends on it; after that, they’re boring.

Can I withdraw to someone else’s bank account or wallet?

To their bank account: no; name-match rules block it. To their wallet: the travel rule makes you declare it’s not yours and name them, and below-threshold transfers aside, expect friction. If you’re trying to pay someone, it’s usually cleaner to withdraw to yourself and pay them conventionally, or send from your own self-custody wallet where no intermediary is involved.

Is the exchange allowed to just refuse my withdrawal?

If a required check fails or goes unanswered, yes: the law explicitly tells platforms not to release funds when ownership information they’ve requested isn’t provided. The fix is nearly always to complete the check. What platforms cannot lawfully do is invent surprise fees to release money; see the scams section, because a “platform” doing that usually isn’t one.

Should I move everything off the exchange once I’ve bought?

That’s a bigger question than a withdrawal guide: it’s the trade-off between exchange risk and key-loss risk, and it deserves the honest treatment we gave it in the self-custody guide. Short version: for meaningful amounts held long-term, moving coins to keys you control is the point of crypto; for small amounts you trade often, the ceremony may cost more than it protects.

Fees, hold policies and legal requirements checked against the platforms’ own published pages and UK legislation in August 2026. This page is reviewed on a schedule and updated when things change. It is education, not advice. There are no affiliate links on this page; if that ever changes it will be disclosed here, in line with our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.