Crypto Mining and Tax: When the Tax Office Treats Your Mining as a Business

Anyone mining crypto-assets in Germany earns taxable income, and does so from the very first reward. The only open question is which category of income your mining falls into: income from a trade or business under section 15 of the Income Tax Act (EStG), or other income from services under section 22 no. 3 EStG. Everything else follows from that classification, from the tax rate to trade tax to the question of whether you have to register a business. This guide walks you along the line drawn by the Federal Ministry of Finance and shows you at each point what you can check yourself. The governing text is the Ministry's circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto-assets. It recast the earlier circular of May 10, 2022 and deals with block creation in margin numbers 35 to 47. Every statement in this text on the taxation of cryptocurrencies comes from that source or directly from the law. Crypto mining is never private asset management for tax purposes This is the sentence on which most misunderstandings hang. Many investors simply transfer what they have learned about buying Bitcoin to mining: hold for a year, then sell tax-free. On the incom...