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No estimate by the German federal government with a disclosed derivation exists. The only quantified figure introduced in parliament comes from an opposition bill and reads “mindestens etwa 5 Mrd. Euro” [at least around 5 billion euros]. Its derivation surfaced only during committee proceedings and traces back to an extrapolation from roughly 10,000 user accounts of a tax software provider.
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 federal government stated on the record
In its reply of 17 September 2025 to a parliamentary question by the Die Linke group (Bundestag printed paper 21/1707) it states verbatim:
Angaben zur Höhe der Steuereinnahmen aus der Besteuerung von Geschäften mit Kryptowerten liegen der Bundesregierung nicht vor. [The federal government has no information on the amount of tax revenue from the taxation of transactions in crypto assets.]
And further: “Daher ist ein statistischer Nachweis der Höhe der Einnahmen aus der Besteuerung von Kryptowerten nicht möglich.” [A statistical determination of the revenue from taxing crypto assets is therefore not possible.]
The reason is a matter of data collection, not of principle: German tax return forms group all income from private disposal transactions together under “Andere Wirtschaftsgüter” [other assets]. Aggregate enforcement data therefore exist, but no crypto-specific figure can be separated out. Introducing separate reporting would be a decision the legislator could take. It had not been taken by the time a multi-billion reform was announced.
The April 2026 figure denotes a bundle, not a crypto value
At the press conference on the 2027 federal budget benchmarks on 29 April 2026, the figure was given as follows, per the transcript published by the Federal Ministry of Finance itself:
wir haben verabredet, dass wir im Bereich Bekämpfung von Finanz- und Steuerkriminalität, Schrägstrich Kryptobesteuerung auf 2 Milliarden Euro kommen werden. [we have agreed that in the area of combating financial and tax crime, slash crypto taxation, we will arrive at 2 billion euros.]
The two billion euros therefore cover crime enforcement and crypto taxation together. A crypto-only share was never quantified.
The 5 billion euros and where they come from
The bill introduced by the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen group (Bundestag printed paper 21/5752) states expected additional revenue of “mindestens etwa 5 Mrd. Euro” without giving any derivation. The bill was rejected by the Finance Committee on 20 May 2026.
The committee report (printed paper 21/6112) put the calculation on record. It notes that the sponsoring group pointed out that no calculations by the Federal Ministry of Finance were available, but that calculations by the Frankfurt School of Finance among others suggested possible annual additional revenue of 11.4 billion euros, and that the bill conservatively assumed only half of that amount.
Those 11.4 billion euros in turn rest on 47.3 billion euros of realised gains for 2024. That figure comes from the Crypto Tax Report 2025 of the tax software provider Blockpit, whose methodology section discloses the basis: “The primary data was derived from anonymized datasets of over 10,000 Blockpit accounts belonging to German users with high data integrity.” It is extrapolated to roughly seven million German crypto users, a factor of about 700. The originator states the limit himself: the assumptions are “extrapolated to the entire German crypto user base”, as individual-level data for all users were not available.
The chain therefore runs: a parliamentary group estimate, halved from a figure in a specialist article, which rests on an industry extrapolation whose representativeness its own originator qualifies. The halving is described as a precaution, not as the correction of an identified error.
The Austrian comparison
Austria abolished its tax-free holding period on 1 March 2022. The official regulatory impact assessment projected additional revenue of 5, 10 and 30 million euros for 2023 to 2025. According to the parliamentary answer of 14 July 2025, actual capital gains tax remitted on cryptocurrencies in 2024 was around 33.8 million euros, or 0.57 per cent of total capital gains tax revenue.
Actual revenue thus exceeded the official projection for 2024. The claim that Austria fell short of its own expectations is incorrect and is not made here. The telling point is different: projection and outcome both sit in the tens of millions, in a strong market year.
Two caveats are essential. First, Austria protected existing holdings: crypto assets acquired before 1 March 2021 remain tax free. The 33.8 million euros therefore come from a substantially narrowed tax base and do not show what a reform covering existing holdings would yield. Second, extrapolating Austrian figures linearly to Germany is methodologically inadmissible; tax revenue does not scale with economic output. Austria serves as an order-of-magnitude reference, not as a basis for calculation.
One more caution: the widely repeated claim that Austria expected “up to 300 million euros” appears in no official document. It goes back to a media rendering that misread the unit of the official table, given in thousands of euros, by a factor of ten.
The direction missing from the calculation
Today the holding period excludes not only gains from taxation after one year, but equally losses from being offset. Abolishing it opens both directions. In loss years the treasury would face a considerable reducing effect, depending on how loss offsetting is designed. No full-cycle calculation has been presented, either in the public debate or in any published official estimate.
A second effect compounds this: moving to the flat withholding tax lowers the rate on the share of gains that is already taxable today, from up to 45 per cent to 25 per cent plus the solidarity surcharge.
What this does not refute
These findings concern how robust the revenue expectation is, not whether the reform is justified. The strongest argument for the reform, equal treatment of realised gains regardless of their source, is not refuted by any of the points above. The underlying report expressly makes no such claim.
Sources
German Bundestag, printed paper 21/1707 of 17 September 2025. dserver.bundestag.de
Federal Ministry of Finance, transcript of the press conference on the 2027 budget benchmarks, 29 April 2026.
German Bundestag, printed papers 21/5752 of 5 May 2026 and 21/6112 of 22 May 2026.
Blockpit: Crypto Tax Report 2025 – Germany. blockpit.io
Republic of Austria, government bill 1293 d.B. (XXVII. GP), regulatory impact assessment; parliamentary answer 1948/AB of 14 July 2025 (XXVIII. GP). parlament.gv.at
Where this answer comes from
This page summarises findings 4, 5 and 6 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.
