How many crypto warning letters has HMRC sent?

81,172 letters, emails and text messages in the 2025 to 2026 year, according to Freedom of Information figures obtained by UHY Hacker Young and first reported on 19 August 2026. Two years earlier the figure was 27,714.

Why is HMRC sending so many more crypto letters now?

Data. UK exchanges already answer HMRC information requests, and since January 2026 the Cryptoasset Reporting Framework requires providers to collect user and transaction data for reporting, with international exchange of that data following from 2027.

Is an HMRC nudge letter an accusation?

No. It is a prompt based on data HMRC holds, inviting you to check your position and use the disclosure route if you owe tax. Ignoring it is what escalates matters, not receiving it.

What should I do first if I get one?

Compute your actual position before responding to anything. Many recipients owe nothing once losses and the allowances of earlier years are counted. Respond within any stated deadline, with real figures.

Can HMRC see my crypto if I never told them about it?

Increasingly, yes. Exchanges with UK customers hand over account data, and from January 2026 providers must collect standardised records for HMRC reporting. The letters exist because the data does.

How far back can HMRC go on crypto?

Under the disclosure guidance, four years where reasonable care was taken, six where it was not, and up to twenty where tax was deliberately unpaid.

HMRC crypto crackdown, what 81,172 warning letters mean

On this page

The numbers, three years of them
Why the number is climbing
What a letter is, and is not
The uncomfortable symmetry
What happens next

HMRC sent 81,172 warning letters, emails and text messages to crypto holders in the 2025 to 2026 year. Two years earlier it sent 27,714. The figures come from a Freedom of Information request by accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young, first reported on 19 August 2026 and picked up widely, and they describe the steepest enforcement ramp UK crypto has seen.

The numbers, three years of them

Year	Warning letters sent
2023 to 2024	27,714
2024 to 2025	about 65,000
2025 to 2026	81,172

Nearly triple in two years. And the letters are the visible end of something larger. HMRC’s statement to reporters, carried in the coverage below, said it is “committed to helping people pay the right amount of tax”, and the polite phrasing sits on top of a hard fact, ICAEW reports the new reporting framework is expected to raise £315 million by 2030.

Why the number is climbing

A nudge letter is not a guess. HMRC sends one when data it already holds suggests you have crypto and your tax return does not mention it. The question worth asking is where the data comes from, and the answer has three layers.

First, UK exchanges have answered HMRC information requests for years, which is how earlier letter waves found their recipients. Second, since January 2026 the Cryptoasset Reporting Framework requires cryptoasset service providers to collect identifying details and transaction records for every UK user, for reporting to HMRC. Third, from 2027 that reporting goes international, with platforms in dozens of countries sharing customer information with UK authorities.

Neela Chauhan, the UHY Hacker Young partner behind the FOI request, put it bluntly: “Once HMRC has this data, tax investigations into cryptocurrency investors will be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

We keep a fuller account of exactly which exchanges report what in what exchanges report to HMRC, updated as the rules bite.

What a letter is, and is not

A nudge letter is a prompt, not an accusation. It invites you to review your position and, if tax is owed, to use the cryptoasset disclosure route before anything formal begins. The people who end up in genuine trouble are overwhelmingly the ones who ignore the letter.

It is also not proof you owe anything. HMRC’s data says you held crypto, it does not say what your gains were. Plenty of recipients compute their position and find losses, or gains sitting under the allowances of earlier years, which reached £12,300 in the 2022 to 2023 year. The letter cannot know that. Only a computation can. Older years hold their own oddities too, and if a collapsed exchange has started paying you back, FTX and Celsius repayments carry their own UK tax that a nudge letter will not explain.

If one has landed on your doormat, we wrote the order of operations before this week’s numbers made the letters famous: got an HMRC crypto letter, do these things in this order.

The uncomfortable symmetry

Here is the part the coverage skips. The same years that taught HMRC to see your exchange accounts also taught crypto tax software to ask for them. The standard tools work by connecting to your exchanges and uploading your complete history to their servers, which means preparing to answer HMRC involves handing a second copy of your financial life to another company.

It does not have to. gains.tax computes your full UK position, section 104 pools, same day and 30-day matching, every disposal cited to the HMRC rule that decides it, entirely in your browser. Nothing you import leaves your machine. You can find out where you stand tonight, privately, and respond to HMRC from knowledge instead of fear.

That is general information, not tax advice. If your situation involves large sums or deliberate non-disclosure, a professional is worth their fee, and our directory lists independent ones.

What happens next

The 2025 to 2026 letters were built on request-based data. The 2026 to 2027 wave will be built on standardised CARF collection, and the wave after that on international exchange. Every year from here, the gap between what HMRC knows and what unprompted holders have declared gets easier to see. The cheapest time to square your position is before the letter, and the second cheapest is the week it arrives.