Precious metals and tax

How tax touches precious metals

Two events are taxable, and only two. The first is the purchase, where value added tax may be added to the price. The second is a sale at a profit, where income tax may fall due on the gain. Holding metal in between is, in Germany and in most of Europe, not a taxable event at all: there is no annual levy on a coin sitting in a safe, and an unrealised gain is invisible to the tax office until it is turned into money.

The two behave quite differently in practice. VAT is charged by the seller, is baked into the price you see and is identical for every buyer. Income tax on a gain is personal: it depends on how long you held the metal, on how much profit you realised across the whole calendar year, and on your own marginal rate. That is why two people can buy the same coin on the same day and end up in completely different positions three years later.

The German position, which the rest of this guide develops, can be summarised in one table:

Sold inside the one-year window, the gain is taxed in Germany at the seller's personal income tax rate, currently somewhere between 14 and 45 per cent, and only if the annual threshold described below is exceeded. The tax calculator applies these rules — and the very different rules of twenty-six other countries — to a concrete purchase and sale.

Whose law this guide describes

Everything that follows is German law. This edition of the site is the international one, and German law is used here as a reference case because it is well documented, because the underlying VAT exemption for investment gold comes from an EU directive that binds every member state, and because the German model of a holding period after which a private gain becomes tax-free is a pattern several other countries share.

It is emphatically not a statement about your own country. The divergence across Europe is far wider than most people expect. Some states treat the private sale of movable property as simply outside the scope of income tax, so a gain is never taxed whatever the holding period. Others tax every gain at a flat rate with no holding period at all, and at least one — Denmark — taxes speculative gains at rates that can approach the top of the personal income scale, with no exemption threshold to soften the first euro. The Netherlands does not tax the gain at all but instead levies an annual charge on the value of the assets themselves. Even the VAT that is exempt on gold everywhere in the Union sits alongside standard rates for silver that range from 17 per cent in Luxembourg to 27 per cent in Hungary.

So the practical instruction is simple: read this guide to understand the mechanics of precious metal taxation — how a holding period works, why an exemption threshold is not an allowance, what a delivery claim does to the treatment of a certificate — and then check your own jurisdiction. The tax calculator holds a researched rule set for each country version of this site and states which statute it relies on. Where a country's legal position is genuinely disputed, the calculator says so rather than inventing certainty.

VAT on the purchase, metal by metal

The largest single tax advantage in this field is the exemption of investment gold from VAT. It is not a German invention: Articles 344 to 356 of Council Directive 2006/112/EC oblige every EU member state to exempt it, and Germany implements that obligation in Section 25c of its VAT Act.

The definition is technical and worth knowing, because it decides whether a given item is exempt. Under the directive, investment gold means gold in the form of a bar or wafer of a weight accepted by the bullion markets and with a fineness of at least 995 thousandths, and gold coins of at least 900 fineness that were minted after 1800, are or have been legal tender in their country of origin and are not normally sold at more than 80 per cent above the open market value of their gold content. A Krugerrand or a Maple Leaf clears every one of those hurdles, which is why buying one costs you the metal value plus the premium and nothing else. A gold ring does not clear them, and is taxed like any other piece of jewellery.

Silver, platinum and palladium are outside the exemption entirely. In Germany that means the standard rate of 19 per cent applies at purchase — the VAT on silver is the main reason the entry cost per gram of silver looks so much worse than gold's. Until the end of 2013 collectors' silver coins could still be sold under a reduced German rate; that route was closed at the start of 2014, and platinum and palladium never had an equivalent. The effect is structural rather than incidental: a silver position has to appreciate by roughly a fifth before the buyer is back to the metal value they paid for.

The gold calculator and the silver calculator work from weight and fineness so you can see the pure metal value that the tax and the premium sit on top of.

The margin scheme and what changed in 2025

The margin scheme under Section 25a of the German VAT Act is a special route in which the dealer does not pay VAT on the full selling price but only on the margin between their own purchase and sale price. For the buyer the effect was an end price that behaved as though the tax were around 7 per cent, even though the invoice shows no VAT separately at all. In practice it was used above all for silver coins imported from outside the European Union.

Since 1 January 2025 that route is closed for new imports in Germany: silver coins newly brought into the Union are taxed at the full 19 per cent. Only stock acquired before 2025 and coins bought back from private individuals may still be resold under the margin scheme, and that pool is finite and shrinking. Silver bars were never eligible in the first place, because Section 25a excludes precious metals in raw form, and the same is true of platinum and palladium.

Alongside this, the German Federal Ministry of Finance effectively ended in 2025 the former arrangement under which silver could be held in a bonded warehouse without triggering German VAT. Taken together, the two changes made the entry into silver, platinum and palladium noticeably more expensive in tax terms. Note what did not change: none of this touches the one-year holding period on the sale side, which is a matter of income tax and works exactly as before.

Selling: the one-year holding period

For German income tax purposes, a private sale of physical precious metal is a private disposal transaction under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. The lever that decides everything is the holding period of one year, traditionally also called the speculative period.

Two details of that period are easy to get wrong. First, it is a calendar year, not a count of 365 days — computed under Section 108 of the German Fiscal Code together with Sections 187 and 188 of the German Civil Code, the period ends on the anniversary of the acquisition. Second, and this is the trap, the statute exempts a sale only where more than one year has passed. A sale executed on the anniversary date itself is therefore still inside the window and still taxable; the tax-free zone begins the following day. If a disposal is close to the line, waiting a day costs nothing and settles the question.

Note also what does not apply. The German flat withholding tax of 25 per cent, which governs interest, dividends and securities gains, has no role here: physical metal is not capital income. The price of that is that a taxable gain is charged at your full personal rate, which for a higher earner is worse than 25 per cent — and the reward is that after twelve months the charge disappears altogether. The tax calculator puts dates and figures into the formula, and the purchase price calculator estimates what a sale realistically returns before tax is considered at all.

The 1,000-euro threshold and the FIFO rule

Anyone selling inside the German holding period meets a second hurdle before tax actually falls due. Gains from all private disposal transactions in a calendar year, added together, remain free of tax up to 1,000 euros. The figure was raised from 600 euros with effect from 2024.

The wording matters more than the number. This is an exemption threshold — a Freigrenze — and not an allowance. The distinction is the single most common error in this whole subject:

• A total gain of 1,000 euros: nothing is taxable.
• A total gain of 1,001 euros: the entire 1,001 euros is taxable, not just the one euro above the line.

At a personal rate of, say, 30 per cent, that single euro of extra profit turns a tax bill of zero into one of about 300 euros. Where a year's gains are hovering near the line, the timing of the last sale is worth more thought than the price. Compare this with the German inheritance and gift allowances described further down, which work the opposite way: there, only the excess is taxed. The glossary entry on the threshold sets the two concepts side by side.

The threshold is also shared. It covers every private disposal transaction of the year together — a profitable crypto trade, a resold collectible and a gold sale all draw on the same 1,000 euros.

If you bought the same metal on several occasions and now sell only part of the holding, German practice applies the FIFO principle: first in, first out. The pieces acquired earliest count as the ones sold first. Since that determines whether the holding period has already run, an orderly list of acquisition dates and prices per position is not administrative fussiness — it decides the tax.

Declaring a taxable gain

A taxable gain from the sale of physical precious metal belongs in the German income tax return on the form Anlage SO — "other income" — in the section covering the disposal of other assets, under Section 22 no. 2 in conjunction with Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. You state the acquisition and disposal dates, the purchase and sale prices and the associated costs; the resulting gain is then taxed at your personal rate along with the rest of your income.

Costs are worth taking seriously here, because they reduce the gain. Directly attributable expenses of the acquisition and the disposal — assay fees, shipping, insured transport, auction commission — belong in the calculation. Ongoing storage costs are a different matter and, in the German view, are not deductible against a private disposal gain.

No entry is required for a sale that is not taxable in the first place. If more than a year lies between purchase and sale, or if the combined gain from all private disposal transactions of the year stays within the 1,000-euro threshold, the transaction generally does not have to be reported at all. That does not remove the need to keep the evidence: an exemption you cannot document is an exemption you may end up arguing about.

Losses and their limited use

Selling inside the German one-year window at a loss is not without value, but the loss is ring-fenced. Under Section 23(3) sentence 7 of the German Income Tax Act it may be set off only against gains from other private disposal transactions of the same calendar year. Offsetting it against salary, against capital income or against rental income is expressly excluded.

A loss that is left over is not wasted. It can be carried back to the previous year or forward into future years — but again only against private disposal gains, which for most people means it sits idle until the next such sale happens.

There is a symmetry here that people often overlook. Once the one-year period has run, a loss is just as irrelevant for tax as a gain is: if the profit would have been free of tax, the loss is not deductible either. Tax-free gains and non-deductible losses are two sides of the same rule. Anyone deliberately realising a loss for tax reasons therefore has to do it inside the year, and needs a gain in the same category to set it against.

Paper gold: ETCs versus ETFs

Holding gold through a securities account rather than a safe changes the tax analysis completely, and under German law one feature decides it: is there an enforceable claim to delivery of the physical metal?

Physically backed exchange-traded commodities whose terms grant the holder a claim to the metal itself were placed on the same income tax footing as physical gold by the German Federal Fiscal Court in its judgment of 12 April 2021, case VIII R 15/18. The court's reasoning was that the security embodies a claim to a specific quantity of gold rather than a monetary claim, so the disposal is a private disposal transaction and the one-year rule applies.

Products without such a claim — ordinary gold ETFs, and ETCs structured as pure debt securities — are treated as capital investments in Germany, and the flat withholding tax applies whatever the holding period. Twenty minutes with the product documentation to establish which category an instrument falls into is, for a large position, worth a great deal of money. Note also that this is a specifically German distinction: the concept of paper gold is universal, but the tax consequence of a delivery claim is not, and elsewhere both product types may be treated identically.

Inheritance and gifts

Precious metal is ordinary property and falls under the German Inheritance and Gift Tax Act. It is valued at market value on the valuation date, which for a coin or a bar means the metal value derived from the spot price on that day plus, in principle, any collector premium the item actually commands.

What decides whether tax is due are the personal allowances, and unlike the 1,000-euro threshold discussed earlier these are genuine allowances: only the amount above them is taxed. They refresh every ten years.

Because the clock resets, staggered gifts every ten years allow substantial holdings to pass down without German gift tax, and metal is convenient for that purpose because value is dense and transfer is simple. One further point is easy to miss: an heir steps into the deceased's position for the purposes of the one-year holding period. Inheriting is not a fresh purchase, so a bar the deceased had held for five years can be sold by the heir immediately without German income tax on the gain.

Cash purchases and the 2,000-euro identification threshold

This section is not about tax at all. It concerns the German Anti-Money Laundering Act, and it is worth separating the two, because the widespread belief that buying gold for cash is somehow a tax matter is simply wrong.

In Germany, a cash purchase of goods over the counter can be made without any identification up to 1,999.99 euros. From 2,000 euros the dealer must record the buyer from an official identity document, and from around 10,000 euros a check on the origin of the funds is added on top. That is a compliance obligation on the dealer, not a tax on you, and it says nothing about whether a later sale is taxable.

The threshold applies per transaction, and splitting a larger purchase into several smaller ones to stay underneath it is expressly prohibited: connected transactions are aggregated. Buying by bank transfer or online is, of course, never anonymous in the first place.

One change is already scheduled. From 10 July 2027, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 introduces a Union-wide cash payment limit of 10,000 euros for payments to traders. Above that figure a cash purchase will no longer be permissible at all, quite independently of any identification duty. Germany currently has no such cap of its own, so this will be a genuine tightening there; a number of member states already apply lower national limits today.

Customs, import and crossing borders

Investment gold enters the European Union free of customs duty, and in Germany it is also free of import VAT — the exemption follows the same logic as the domestic one. Silver, platinum and palladium coming from outside the Union attract German import VAT at 19 per cent, and since the bonded warehouse route was effectively closed in 2025 there is no longer a practical way of deferring it indefinitely. The customs and import entry in the glossary sets out the mechanics.

Separately from tax there is a declaration duty when crossing a border with metal, and gold is explicitly caught by it. Under Regulation (EU) 2018/1672 on cash controls, unwrought gold — bars, nuggets, lumps — with a fineness of at least 99.5 per cent counts as cash, and gold coins with a gold content of at least 90 per cent count as an equivalent highly liquid store of value.

From a total value of 10,000 euros, the consequences differ by border. Crossing an external border of the Union, into or out of a non-EU country, you must declare the cash in writing and unprompted. Travelling within the Union there is no active declaration, but customs may demand disclosure on request; in Germany that obligation sits in Section 12a of the Customs Administration Act. Again this is a control against money laundering rather than a levy — but the penalties for failing to declare are substantial, and ignorance of the rule is not a defence.

When private dealing becomes a business

For almost every private investor, buying and selling precious metal is private asset management: the gains fall under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act and are free of tax after a year. The picture changes if the activity becomes a trade, because a trade is subject to income tax and, in Germany, trade tax as well — and crucially the one-year exemption disappears entirely.

Under Section 15(2) of the Income Tax Act, a commercial activity requires four elements at once: it must be independent, sustained, carried on with the intention of making a profit and constitute participation in general economic activity — and it must go beyond the bounds of private asset management. The last of these is where the argument usually happens.

The German Federal Fiscal Court decides it on the overall picture. Frequent short-term turnover of stock, the use of borrowed capital, an organised sales operation, buying specifically for resale rather than to hold — these point towards a trade. Simple purchase and sale of one's own holdings, even in substantial volume and even at a large profit, generally remains private asset management. There is no bright-line number of transactions per year in this field comparable to the tests developed for property dealing, which is precisely why anyone operating at scale or with leverage should take professional advice before rather than after the tax return.

Records, receipts and proof

A German tax exemption you cannot evidence is worth very little. If you intend to rely on the one-year period, or to claim a loss, the burden of demonstrating the facts is yours, and the tax office is under no obligation to reconstruct them for you.

• Dated purchase receipt. The single most important document, because it fixes the start of the holding period. Without a purchase date the exemption is arguable rather than certain.
• Purchase and sale prices. The basis for computing the gain. Where a metal was bought in several tranches, document each position separately so that the FIFO sequence can be reproduced.
• Certificates and sealed packaging. These evidence authenticity and provenance, tend to improve the price on resale and make it far easier to match an item to a purchase years later.
• A complete schedule. A simple table per calendar year with date, metal, quantity, purchase price and sale price is enough, and it is exactly what the Anlage SO needs if a sale does turn out to be taxable.

Private individuals in Germany are not subject to the retention periods that bind businesses, but that is cold comfort: the practical rule is to keep acquisition documents for as long as you hold the item and for several years after you have sold it, since assessments can be reopened. Storing the paperwork somewhere other than with the metal is sensible for the same reason you would not keep the spare key in the lock — the topic is dealt with properly in the guide on storing and insuring precious metals.

What this guide does not do

This is general information about German tax law as it stands in 2026, written for an international readership that needs a worked example of how precious metal taxation functions. It is not individual tax advice, and it cannot be. Thresholds and rates move, administrative practice shifts, and the answer to almost every interesting question depends on facts this page knows nothing about.

Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, every legal statement above is German unless it explicitly says otherwise; if you are tax resident elsewhere, none of it decides your case, and the tax calculator is the place to start instead. Second, this site recommends no dealers and makes no price forecasts, here or anywhere else. Third, where the legal position on a point is genuinely unsettled, the honest answer is that it is unsettled — and that is what you will find in the country rule sets rather than a confident number.

For a concrete case, a qualified tax adviser or the competent tax office is the right address; in Germany that means a Steuerberater or your local Finanzamt. The terms used throughout this guide are defined individually in the glossary.