Kenya cryptocurrency tax guide

What this guide covers

This guide covers Kenya's current crypto/digital-asset tax framework for the 2025/26 period, following a volatile recent history, based on secondary legal and tax-advisory reporting of the Finance Act 2025 and a related Excise Duty Act amendment. kra.go.ke itself wasn't directly fetched in this research pass. This is educational information, not individualized tax advice.

Tax treatment of cryptocurrency

What gets taxed in Kenya changed fundamentally in 2025 — from the value of your crypto trade to the fee your platform charges you. Here's the history: Kenya introduced a 3% Digital Asset Tax (DAT) via the Finance Act 2023, effective September 2023, under Section 12F of the Income Tax Act. This was a transaction tax on the gross value of a crypto trade or transfer, applied regardless of profit or loss. It was challenged in court: the Court of Appeal reportedly declared the underlying Finance Act 2023 unconstitutional, but Kenya's Supreme Court later reportedly reinstated it. The Finance Act 2025 then repealed the 3% DAT entirely, replacing it with a different mechanism: a 10% excise duty, not on the value of the crypto transaction itself, but specifically on the FEE a virtual asset service provider (VASP) charges for facilitating that transaction, effective 1 July 2025. This guide treats that distinction — fee-based, not transaction-value-based — as the central fact for Kenya going forward.

Common taxable events

• Trading or transferring crypto assets through a VASP that charges a fee for the service — the VASP's fee is subject to 10% excise duty, collected and remitted by the VASP, not the individual customer directly.
• This guide does not identify a separate individual income or capital gains tax on the crypto trading gain itself under current Kenyan law — the 10% excise duty is a transaction-fee-based levy on the service provider, distinct from an income tax on the trader's profit.

Potentially non-taxable events

• A peer-to-peer crypto transfer with no VASP fee involved — this guide doesn't confirm whether the 10% excise duty would have any base to apply to in that scenario, since the duty is specifically tied to a chargeable VASP fee.
• Simply holding crypto, without a transaction — not itself a taxable event under either the former DAT or the current excise-duty structure.

Tax rates and thresholds

The best-supported current rate is a 10% excise duty on the fee charged by a VASP for facilitating a virtual-asset transaction, effective 1 July 2025 — NOT 3% (the repealed DAT) and NOT a rate applied to the full transaction value. This guide flags two separate rate-conflict issues: one secondary source reported a 1.5% figure, traced to an earlier Finance Bill 2025 proposal that didn't survive into the enacted Finance Act (treated as superseded); and a separate AllAfrica report on the bill's signing describes a 5% rate instead of 10%, which this guide has not been able to resolve, though 10% is corroborated by three independent sources against the single 5% report.

Cost basis and calculation

This category doesn't apply the way it usually does in this knowledge base: the 10% excise duty is calculated on the VASP's fee amount, not on a trading gain, so there's no cost-basis or gain computation for an individual trader under this specific levy. This guide doesn't identify a separate income-tax cost-basis mechanism for crypto trading gains under current Kenyan law.

Reporting and compliance

• VASPs operating in Kenya are reported as responsible for collecting and remitting the 10% excise duty on their transaction fees to KRA — the compliance burden sits with the platform, not the individual trader directly.
• This guide doesn't independently confirm the exact remittance deadline under the current excise-duty structure. The former DAT used a 5-day window; this guide doesn't assume the same cadence carries over without direct confirmation.

Residency and cross-border issues

Not independently resolved in this pass. Confirm current residency rules and any extraterritorial application to offshore VASPs serving Kenyan customers directly with KRA.

Example

This example is hypothetical, for illustration only. Wanjiru trades crypto through a VASP that charges a KES 500 fee for the transaction. Under the current 10% excise duty, the VASP owes KES 50 in excise duty on that fee — a charge on the service fee, not on the value of the crypto traded or on Wanjiru's trading profit. This differs fundamentally from the repealed 3% DAT, which would have applied a percentage to the full transaction value regardless of any fee charged.

Official resources

• Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA): https://www.kra.go.ke/

Limitations and review information

Tax year covered: 2025/26. Last verified: October 28, 2026 (citation-integrity pass; found and disclosed a new 5%-vs-10% rate conflict). Known verification gap: kra.go.ke itself was not directly fetched; this guide relies on consistent secondary legal/tax-advisory reporting of the Finance Act 2025's repeal of the DAT and the Excise Duty Act amendment, rather than the enacted text itself, and does not resolve the 5%-vs-10% conflict. Given this country's recent history of rapid legislative reversal, this guide should be re-verified at each future review rather than assumed stable. This is educational information only, not individualized tax advice — confirm current specifics directly with KRA or a Kenyan tax professional.