A crypto tax accountant will charge you somewhere between a few hundred and several thousand for one tax year. The spread is that wide because the price tracks your transaction count and the state of your records, not the difficulty of the tax.
Rough market shape, for a single year:
| Your situation | Typical price |
|---|---|
| Under 1,000 trades, clean records | $250 to $700 |
| Around 5,000 trades | $750 to $1,500 |
| 10,000 trades with DeFi | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Multi-year reconstruction, dead exchanges | $5,000+, sometimes well past $10,000 |
Hourly rates sit behind all of it. Crypto-literate accountants and CPAs bill $100 to $400 an hour. Forensic specialists charge more. The software vendors who sell done-for-you services land in the same place: CoinTracking's full-service tier starts around $1,950 per client.
So the honest answer is that it costs whatever your mess costs to untangle, times an hourly rate. Which raises the obvious question.
Why is it so expensive? It's a tax return, not a novel
You'd assume you're buying tax expertise. You're buying a bit of it. But crypto tax rules aren't exotic. In the UK it's Section 104 pooling plus the same-day and 30-day rules. In the US it's Form 8949 and Schedule D with a cost basis method. Hand an experienced accountant a clean, complete crypto history and the computation takes under an hour.
You're paying for the part before that. Getting from "here's my Coinbase CSV, my Kraken CSV, three wallet addresses and a hazy memory of an exchange that doesn't exist anymore" to one complete, internally consistent transaction history is the job. We've written up where those 20 hours go in detail, but briefly:
- Every venue exports a different format. Different column names, different timestamp conventions, different transaction IDs.
- Transfers between your own accounts have to be matched by hand, or they get taxed as sales you never made.
- Cost basis has to survive every hop: exchange to wallet, wallet to DEX, chain to chain.
- LP positions, staking, bridges and wraps have no counterparty report telling anyone what happened.
- Anything you no longer have records for gets rebuilt from block explorers, bank statements and whatever else survived.
None of that is tax knowledge. It's data work, it's slow, and it's being done by someone billing $200 an hour.
What actually moves the price
| Driver | Effect |
|---|---|
| Transaction count | The biggest factor by far. Most quotes are tiered directly on it. |
| Number of exchanges and wallets | Each source is another format and another reconciliation pass. |
| DeFi, LPs, staking, bridging | Often doubles the price of an otherwise identical file. |
| Dead or delisted exchanges | Records get rebuilt, not imported. |
| Missing cost basis | Every unresolved deposit is a manual investigation. |
| Number of tax years | Multiplies everything above. |
| Deadline pressure | Rush work carries a surcharge nearly everywhere. |
One tell worth knowing. If someone quotes you before they've seen your data, they're either padding to protect themselves or lowballing and planning to revise later. Neither ends well for you.
Do you need a specialist?
If your activity is simple, no. Bought crypto on one exchange, sold some, never moved it anywhere, never touched DeFi? A competent general accountant plus decent software gets you there.
The moment you have transfers between venues, on-chain activity, or a hole in your history, a generalist is at a real disadvantage. Their tax knowledge is fine. What they lack is any efficient way to do the reconciliation, so most of them will take whatever your tax software spat out and file it. That works when the software got it right. It's a problem when the software quietly treated 38 internal transfers as disposals, because now your accountant is auditing a piece of software instead of your actual trading history, and neither of you knows it.
The retainer problem
Traditional firms sell a relationship. You engage them, they do your return, and they'd like to keep doing it every year. Sensible if you run a business. Less sensible if you're one person with a personal portfolio and one bad year of records.
You don't have an ongoing accounting problem. You have a specific historical mess. Fix it once and it stays fixed.
The third option: buy the fix, not the relationship
If the mess is the problem, buy a fix for the mess.
That's what Moonscape's crypto tax rescue is. Show us what you've got: exchanges connected read-only, wallet addresses, whatever CSVs survived. Redacted files are fine, we need transactions and not identities. Before anyone talks about money you get a free diagnostic scan back, built from your data: transactions found, sources found, missing cost bases, unmatched transfers, duplicates, tax years affected. Takes about two business days, and the report is yours to keep whether you go further or not.
Then we quote off your real numbers, fixed:
- £499 standard fix, up to 1,000 transactions
- £999 complex, up to 10,000, which is where most DeFi histories land
- £1,999 forensic: cross-chain history, dead exchanges, several years
One-off, per tax year. No retainer, no engagement letter, no annual relationship unless you want one.
What comes back is filing-ready. Every transfer matched, every cost basis resolved, DeFi classified, and a line-by-line audit trail behind every number. SA108 and an HMRC-ready gains summary in the UK. Form 8949 and Schedule D in the US. File it yourself, or hand it to your accountant so they can spend their hour on the thing they're actually good at.
Being straight about the comparison
A crypto specialist doing the same reconstruction typically bills £1,500 to £3,000. We're cheaper because the reconciliation runs through a tax engine built for exactly this problem, with an analyst resolving whatever the engine can't. We're not cheaper because we do less of it.
And we don't file for you. Real limitation, worth knowing before you get excited. We prepare everything so that filing takes minutes, but pressing submit is on you or your accountant.
Want to know what your file would actually cost before committing to anything? The scan is free. Worst case you find out exactly how bad it is, which is more than most people can say right now.