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There is no official figure. The order of magnitude used in the debate, around seven million crypto users in Germany, comes from no government survey. It is the reference population to which a tax software provider extrapolated data from roughly 10,000 of its own user accounts.
Note on quotations: official German sources are quoted verbatim in German, with a working translation in square brackets. A translated official quotation is no longer a quotation.
What the state knows about those affected
Little. Asked about the number of taxpayers with undeclared crypto gains and about the socio-demographic structure of those affected, the federal government answered repeatedly on 17 September 2025 in the same words: “Der Bundesregierung liegen hierzu keine Erkenntnisse vor.” [The federal government has no findings on this.] (Bundestag printed paper 21/1707)
The reason lies in how data are collected. German tax return forms group all income from private disposal transactions together under “Andere Wirtschaftsgüter” [other assets]. Crypto assets cannot be evaluated separately from that.
What can be evidenced
What can be evidenced is not the number of holders but the distribution of their holdings. According to the European Central Bank Consumer Expectations Survey of November 2024, analysed in the Financial Stability Review of May 2025, 54 per cent of crypto owners hold less than 1,000 euros and 91 per cent less than 20,000 euros.
Two qualifications must be read alongside this. The survey is an aggregate across selected euro area countries, not a survey for Germany. And it measures holdings, not realised gains: someone holding 900 euros today may have realised substantial gains before.
It expressly does not follow that small savers are predominantly affected by the reform. How realised gains are distributed is unknown for lack of incidence data, and that same gap affects both sides of the debate.
Why the gap matters for the reform
The extrapolation underlying the revenue expectation assumes an average German crypto portfolio of 57,300 euros. The same survey also reports a median of 13,000 euros, less than a quarter of the mean. Building a tax estimate on the mean of a strongly right-skewed distribution means calculating with a value most of those affected never reach.
The reform is therefore being decided about a group whose size is estimated, whose composition has not been surveyed and whose distribution of gains is unknown. That is not a footnote about data quality. It is the basis on which billions are entered into the federal budget.
Sources
German Bundestag, printed paper 21/1707 of 17 September 2025. dserver.bundestag.de
European Central Bank: Just another crypto boom? Mind the blind spots. Financial Stability Review, May 2025, Special Feature; data basis Consumer Expectations Survey November 2024, selected euro area countries. ecb.europa.eu
Blockpit: Crypto Tax Report 2025 – Germany. blockpit.io
Where this answer comes from
This page summarises findings 5, 6 and 7 from the fact check Die öffentliche Begründung der Reform – vierzehn Behauptungen zur Haltefrist nach § 23 EStG, geprüft an den Primärquellen (Peter Rochel, 2026, 43 pages, 44 sources, CC BY 4.0). The full report, with every reference and caveat, is permanently citable at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21792953. The author is a co-petitioner of petition 201716; the conflict of interest is disclosed in the report.
