Crypto profit and loss calculator

Your exchange's profit figure and this one will not agree

Most exchange dashboards show a profit-and-loss number that nets off what the trade cost you to make: trading fees, brokerage, gas, withdrawal charges. That is a perfectly reasonable way to work out whether you are ahead. It is not how section 115BBH computes income.

The section permits no deduction in respect of any expenditure other than cost of acquisition. Cost of acquisition is the entire list. Trading fees, brokerage, gas fees, withdrawal fees and platform subscriptions are all outside it, so none of them reduces the income being taxed. On a high-frequency history the two figures can diverge sharply, and the taxable one is always the larger. This page follows the statute: it deducts the cost of acquisition and nothing else, so the profit figure above is the one tax is computed on rather than the one your exchange shows.

Profit before tax and profit after tax are different decisions

At 31.2% — 30% under section 115BBH plus 4% Health and Education Cess — just under a third of a gain goes in tax before surcharge is even considered. Surcharge sits on top of that and depends on your total income for the year, which this tool never sees, and crypto income does not get the 15% surcharge cap that dividend income and gains under sections 111A, 112 and 112A get. For a large total income the effective rate on this profit can approach 39%.

None of that changes the profit figure at the top of this page. It changes what is left of it, which is the number the "left after tax" row is there to give you.

One trade at a time

This page computes a single disposal, because that is how the return reports one: Schedule VDA is transaction-level, one row per transfer, and each row carries its own cost of acquisition and its own income. Nothing is netted across rows. If you have a year of trades rather than one, the Schedule VDA generator reads a transaction file and produces the rows; if what you want is the liability rather than the profit, the tax calculator is the same computation with the tax figure at the front.