Crypto tax in Nigeria: what changed in 2026

Since 31 July 2026, selling crypto in Nigeria carries a 1% withholding tax on the gross amount you sell, deducted by the app you sell through. Your actual gain is then taxed at the normal income tax rates. Stablecoins are the exception: the rules say no withholding tax applies to selling USDT or USDC.

The document behind all of this is the Nigeria Revenue Service's Guidelines on the Taxation of Virtual Assets, Information Circular No. 2026/21, published on 31 July 2026. It's the first time Nigeria has set out how crypto is taxed in one place, and the detail in it matters more than the headline rate. For the wider picture on what changed across Nigerian money rules this year, see Nigeria's money rules in 2026. This article explains what the rules say. It isn't tax advice, and if real money is involved you want an accountant looking at your own numbers.

Which taxes apply to crypto in Nigeria now?

There are six, and they do different jobs. Income tax lands on your gain. A 1% withholding tax comes off the sale at source and counts towards that income tax. Stamp duty of 1.5% lands when you move between tokens and naira. A 10% withholding tax lands on staking, mining and airdrop income. VAT of 7.5% lands on the app's own service fee, not on the coins.

The guidelines also sort virtual assets into six categories, because the treatment changes by category. Cryptocurrencies and exchange tokens are Category 1, which covers Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and BNB. Stablecoins are Category 2. Security and investment tokens are Category 3. Utility and governance tokens are Category 4. NFTs are Category 5. Sovereign digital currency is Category 6.

Two things are expressly outside all of this. The eNaira and every other central bank digital currency are excluded from the framework. And the transfer of ownership of a virtual asset is not, by itself, a taxable supply for VAT, so the 7.5% attaches to what the app charges you rather than to the value of the coins.

Is your crypto gain worked out in naira or in dollars?

In dollars. This is the single most useful thing in the guidelines and almost nothing written about Nigerian crypto tax has it right. Paragraph 9.1.1 says the gain is "computed by reference to the USD value of the asset at acquisition and at disposal", and only the resulting dollar gain is then converted to naira, at the CBN or NAFEM rate on the day of disposal.

What it means for you is that the naira getting weaker doesn't create a tax bill. Work through it with round numbers.

Say you bought 1,000 USDT for $1,000, when the naira was around 1,300 to the dollar. A year later you sell it, still at a dollar a token, and the naira is now around 1,500. In naira, your holding went from 1,300,000 naira to 1,500,000 naira, so it looks like you made 200,000 naira. In dollars you made nothing at all.

Because the gain is computed in dollars first, the taxable gain here is nil. That 200,000 naira is the naira weakening, not you earning, and the rule is written so you aren't taxed on it. If the calculation ran in naira instead, you'd owe income tax on a gain that never existed.

It works the other way too, and that part is worth knowing before you plan around it. Buy a coin at $500 and sell it at $600 and you've made a $100 gain, which is taxable whatever the naira did in between. Holding dollars rather than naira protects you from the currency, not from the tax.

One practical consequence: you need the dollar value of every buy and every sell, not just the naira figures your bank statement shows. That's the record most people don't keep and then can't reconstruct.

What is the 1% withholding tax on crypto sales?

It's 1% of the gross amount you sell, taken off at source by the app or the P2P marketplace rather than paid by you later. It applies to Category 1, 3 and 5 assets, which is cryptocurrencies, security tokens and NFTs. The guidelines are explicit that it's computed "on gross proceeds, not on the gain".

That wording has a sharp edge. Because it's charged on the whole sale rather than on your profit, you can have 1% withheld on a sale you made a loss on. Sell $2,000 of Ether for less than you paid, and $20 still comes off.

The relief is that it isn't a final tax. Paragraph 9.4 says tax withheld by the apps "shall be credited against the final tax liability", with any balance payable or refundable through your annual return. So the 1% is a payment on account, and if too much was taken you claim it back on the return. Which only works if you have the statements, so keep them.

Two gaps worth knowing about. The guidelines set no monetary threshold for the 1%, so there's no small-sale exemption written into them. And where a trade happens entirely off-platform with no intermediary at all, there's nobody to withhold, and those transactions fall to annual self-assessment instead.

Do you pay tax when you sell USDT or USDC?

Stablecoins get the lightest treatment of any category, but they aren't untaxed. Paragraph 9.5 says plainly that "no withholding tax shall apply to the disposal of stablecoins", so the 1% doesn't come off. The gain itself is still assessable, and the guidelines note that because a stablecoin's gain is measured against the currency it's pegged to, it "will in normal circumstances be nil or negligible".

So selling USDT for naira generally produces no withholding tax and close to no taxable gain. Two caveats sit alongside that:

• Stamp duty still applies to an eligible transfer between tokens and naira, which is the 1.5% dealt with below.
• Any yield the stablecoin earns is a different thing from the stablecoin. Interest or rewards on a stablecoin balance are assessed as crypto income under Category 4, not as a disposal.

If the mechanics of moving between stablecoins and naira are what you're after rather than the tax, we've covered how to convert USDT to naira step by step.

Is there stamp duty when you buy crypto with naira?

Yes, and at 1.5% it's the largest single charge in the guidelines. Paragraph 6.3 says "stamp duty applies to TOKEN to FIAT and FIAT to TOKEN transfers" under item 33 of the Ninth Schedule to the Nigeria Tax Act 2025. So it attaches to moving between crypto and naira in either direction, which is what most Nigerian users are actually doing.

Three details decide what it costs you:

1. The person receiving the tokens bears it. The guidelines say "the duty is borne by the transferee of the token in every dutiable transaction", so it lands on the buying side of a token-for-naira trade.
2. It's taken in tokens, not in cash. A platform "shall withhold the stamp duty in token units from the tokens credited to the transferee", and it "does not reduce the fiat consideration payable". You pay the same naira and receive slightly fewer tokens.
3. Swapping one token for another isn't dutiable. Token-to-token swaps are listed as not applicable for stamp duty, and paying for goods or services with crypto is generally not dutiable either unless the underlying transaction is independently dutiable.

The guidelines use the phrase "eligible token transfers" without ever defining eligible, which is the one real soft spot in this section. The direction of travel is clear enough though: buying crypto with naira is the transaction the duty is built around, and it's charged in the coins you receive.

What tax do you pay on staking, mining and airdrops?

A 10% withholding tax, applied under the withholding tax regulations to staking, mining, airdrop and DeFi receipts. This is a different charge from the 1% on disposals, and it catches income that arrives as coins rather than as a sale.

The practical problem with it is that there's often nobody to withhold. A protocol paying you staking rewards or dropping tokens into your wallet isn't a Nigerian platform deducting tax at source, so in most cases this lands on you to declare. Professional fees paid in crypto carry their own withholding tax of 5% or 10%, depending on the service.

Where does Daya Coins fit?

For a Nigerian holder, most of this starts and ends in whichever app you buy and sell through. Daya Coins lets you buy straight from your own Daya naira balance, with no peer-to-peer and no minimum, and you can sell and have the naira paid out to a Nigerian bank account. It covers the majors, stablecoins and viral tokens, and any token can be bought by pasting its contract address.

On cost, Daya Coins charges no buy fee, no sell fee, no withdrawal fee and no network fee on your side, and states that it makes its money on the spread built into the rate you see. Against that, Quidax charges 0.1% to take a price on its order book, plus a flat 200 naira to withdraw naira and 50 naira stamp duty on amounts from 10,000 naira.

Where Daya Coins isn't the whole answer: it doesn't do your tax for you, and no app does. The record you need is yours. Whatever app you use, ask it two questions before you rely on it at tax time.

1. What does it deduct from a sale, and does that show on a statement you can download?
2. Does its statement give you the dollar value of each trade, not just the naira, since the dollar figure is what the gain is computed from?

Getting the naira out safely is a separate worry from getting the tax right, and we've written about selling crypto for naira without getting your account frozen if that's the part you're weighing up.

Does swapping one coin for another count as a disposal?

Yes. Trading Ether for Bitcoin is a disposal of the Ether, so it's a taxable event even though no naira moved and nothing reached your bank. The guidelines illustrate exactly this case, applying the 1% to an Ether-for-Bitcoin swap. The gain is worked out in dollars on both legs, the same as any other disposal.

This is the rule people trip over, because a swap doesn't feel like cashing out. If you've been rotating between coins all year without ever touching naira, you've still made a string of disposals, and each one has a dollar gain or loss attached to it.

Can you use a crypto loss to reduce other tax?

No. Crypto losses are ring-fenced. The guidelines say "VA losses may only be set off against VA gains" and that "losses from non-VA activities shall not be offset against VA gains". So a bad year in crypto can't reduce the tax on your salary or your freelance income, and a bad year elsewhere can't reduce the tax on a crypto gain.

The compensation is that crypto losses don't expire. Capital losses "may be carried forward indefinitely and set off only against future VA gains". Gains and losses are computed in dollars and netted at the end of the year, so a loss on one coin does reduce the gain on another in the same year.

Which purchase price do you use if you've bought the same coin many times?

First in, first out, unless you choose otherwise. The guidelines set FIFO as the default cost-base method, which means the coins you sell are treated as the ones you bought earliest. Weighted average cost is accepted instead, but only if you elect it and apply it consistently.

The restriction worth noting: you can't switch retrospectively. Pick one method and you're committed to it going forward, so you can't reach back and recalculate an earlier year on whichever basis produces a smaller bill. Stamp duty paid when you acquired a coin forms part of its cost, and isn't deducted again on disposal.

What records do you need, and for how long?

You need to keep them for six years, where a valuation had no market price behind it. Anyone active in virtual assets also has to register for tax and get a Tax ID: the guidelines say "any person engaged in VAs activities shall register for tax purposes and obtain a Tax ID", and income has to be declared in annual returns.

In practice the records that save you money are the ones that prove your cost base and your withholding credits:

• The dollar value of every acquisition and every disposal, with the date, since that's what the gain is computed from.
• Statements showing any 1% withholding that was deducted, so you can credit it on the annual return rather than paying twice.
• Which cost-base method you're using, and when you started using it.
• A note of swaps between coins, because those are disposals and your bank statement will show nothing at all.

Does any of this apply to the eNaira?

No. The guidelines exclude the eNaira and all central bank digital currencies from the virtual asset tax framework outright. Holding, sending or receiving eNaira isn't a virtual asset transaction for these purposes, so none of the charges above attach to it.

What do you actually need to do now?

There are five, and the first one becomes impossible if you leave it. Nothing here is urgent in the sense of a deadline landing this week, but the records are only cheap to gather while the year is still running.

1. Pull your trade history out of every app and wallet you've used this year, with dollar values attached, while the apps still have it.
2. Get a Tax ID if you don't have one. The guidelines require it of anyone engaged in virtual asset activity.
3. Work out your gains in dollars first, then convert. Running it in naira will overstate what you owe, sometimes by a lot.
4. Add up any 1% that was withheld, and treat it as a credit rather than a cost.
5. Count your swaps as disposals, not just your cash-outs.

If what you really want to know is whether any of this is legal in the first place rather than what it costs, that's a separate question and we've answered it in is crypto legal in Nigeria.