UK accountant cost vs DIY crypto tax: 2026 pricing breakdown

For most UK crypto investors in 2026, doing your own Self Assessment with software costs £39 to £199; a crypto-specialist accountant runs £300 to £800 for a simple portfolio and £1,000 to £3,000 for complex DeFi or business activity. The accountant is worth paying for in narrow circumstances — otherwise software wins on price and accuracy.

How much does a UK crypto accountant cost?

DIY with crypto tax software: £39–£199

The cheapest legitimate path through UK Self Assessment is software plus your own time. Pricing across the major UK-aware tools in 2026:

• Koinly Newbie — £39 for up to 100 transactions. Suits buy-and-hold investors with a couple of exchanges.
• Koinly Hodler — £79 for 1,000 transactions. The middle plan most active investors land on.
• Koinly Trader — £159 for 10,000+ transactions. DeFi power users and frequent traders.
• Coinpanda Hodler — about $49 (≈£40) for 100 transactions. Sometimes the cheapest entry tier.

Time cost: budget 30 to 90 minutes for a typical portfolio. Most of that is generating read-only API keys on each exchange. The calculation itself is instant — no manual share-pooling required. Output drops directly onto SA108 boxes 14–22.

Software pays for itself if your portfolio is over about 30 transactions or if you have any DeFi activity. Below that, a careful spreadsheet implementing share-pool maths is feasible but error-prone.

Generalist accountant: £200–£500

A high-street accountant unfamiliar with crypto will quote £200 to £500 for a Self Assessment, regardless of whether crypto is included. The catch: they almost always run the figures through Koinly or a competitor anyway, sometimes charging the licence as a separate disbursement.

Generalist accountants are fine for the SA100 itself — the wrapper of personal income, dividends, pension contributions and the like. For the crypto-specific SA108 working they tend to either:

• Ask you to provide the figures (effectively pushing you to DIY software anyway), or
• Subcontract the calculation to a specialist, marking up the cost.

If your crypto activity is straightforward — under 50 disposals, no DeFi, no staking — a generalist with a decent disposition towards new tech is workable. For anything more complex, pay for the specialist directly.

Crypto-specialist accountant: £300–£3,000

UK firms specialising in crypto tax (Wright Vigar, Recap-affiliated firms, HW Fisher's digital asset team and others) typically scale fees by complexity rather than by hours. Indicative pricing:

What you're paying for at the higher end: HMRC manual fluency on edge cases (negligible value claims, soft-fork tax treatment, hard-fork allocations, the line between income and capital on airdrops), prior experience with Compliance Checks, and a relationship that survives multiple tax years.

When professional help is worth paying for

Specific situations where the £500 to £2,000 fee earns out:

• HMRC enquiry already open.Don't respond alone. The cost of a wrong answer is far higher than a specialist's hourly rate.
• Very large portfolio (£1m+). The downside risk on a calculation error is too big to absorb.
• Residency or domicile change. Becoming UK-resident, leaving the UK, or claiming the remittance basis with crypto on the books — all need expert handling.
• Complex DeFi.Liquidity provision, yield farming, perpetuals, options on-chain — UK case law is thin and accountants can take a defensible position you'd struggle to argue alone.
• Mining or trading as a business. Triggers self-employment, NICs, possibly VAT registration — out of scope for tax software.
• NFT royalties or content monetisation. The income/capital line is fact-specific.
• Voluntary disclosure of past years.HMRC's Worldwide Disclosure Facility and Digital Disclosure Service have specific procedures — get a specialist to manage them.

For everyone else — and that's most people — software handles the SA108 numbers and you self-file via gov.uk in about an hour.

Summary

DIY with software at £39–£199 is the right call for most UK crypto investors. Specialist accountants at £300–£3,000 are worth paying when the situation is complex or there's an open enquiry. Generalist high-street firms typically run the same software anyway and aren't adding much over self-filing.

For software comparison, see our roundups of crypto tax software for UK and best 2026 features. For filing mechanics, see SA108 for crypto. The HMRC cryptoassets manual is at gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/cryptoassets-manual.