Airdrop, Staking and Mining Tax Calculator

Leg 1, on receipt: market value × YOUR SLAB. Leg 2, on sale: (sale − value already taxed) × 30%. Mining's cost of acquisition is NIL.

Section 115BBH taxes the transfer of a virtual digital asset, not its receipt, which is why crypto that arrives without being bought is charged twice under two different provisions at two different rates. The first charge falls when the coins land. An airdrop is received without consideration and is caught by section 56(2)(x), which since the Finance Act 2022 treats a virtual digital asset as property for that purpose; staking and mining rewards are earned rather than gifted and are charged as income from other sources. Either way the rate is the recipient's own slab rate applied to the fair market value on the date of receipt, which makes this the one place in Indian crypto taxation where the slab still changes the answer — a 5% earner pays 5% on the value that lands while a 30% earner pays 30%. That charge falls in the year of receipt whether or not anything is ever sold, so the liability can arise while no money has reached the taxpayer at all. The second charge falls on sale, at the flat 30% under section 115BBH plus cess, computed on the excess of the sale consideration over the cost of acquisition. For an airdrop or a staking reward the cost of acquisition is the amount already brought to tax on receipt, so only the appreciation after landing is charged again. For mined coins it is nil: the memorandum to the Finance Act 2022 states that infrastructure cost incurred in mining is not treated as cost of acquisition, so the rig, the electricity, the cooling and the bandwidth are deductible at neither stage and the entire sale value is charged at 30% rather than any appreciation since mining. A miner who spends ₹8 lakh of power to produce ₹10 lakh of coin is taxed as though the coin cost nothing. The section 56(2)(x) threshold behaves like the one in the gift provisions and traps people the same way: the words charge the whole of the aggregate value where that aggregate exceeds ₹50,000, so airdrops totalling exactly ₹50,000 carry no tax at all and ₹50,001 makes the entire ₹50,001 taxable, tested on the year's aggregate rather than on each airdrop, and not extending to staking or mining rewards in any amount. An airdrop that stays under the threshold is never brought to tax on receipt and therefore carries no cost of acquisition either, so its whole sale value is charged at 30% later. The consequence that costs people most is what happens when a token falls between the two events, which is the ordinary shape of an airdrop that arrives at peak attention and is locked until later. Slab tax has already been charged on the higher value; the fall produces a loss on the section 115BBH leg; and section 115BBH(2)(b) extinguishes that loss entirely — it cannot be set off against another virtual digital asset, against any other income, or carried forward to any later year. The relief never arrives in any year, so the effective rate on the cash actually received can exceed 100%: a token worth ₹5 lakh on landing and ₹50,000 on sale costs ₹1.56 lakh at the 30% slab against ₹50,000 received. Finally, section 194S withholds 1% of the sale consideration rather than of the gain, so it is deducted even on a sale at a loss, creditable against the final liability and refundable if it exceeds it. One point on this page is genuinely unsettled rather than merely counter-intuitive: whether a staking reward is taxable when it lands or only when it is sold has not been clarified by the CBDT, the competing reading being that a staking reward is not received from any person and nothing accrues until disposal. The figures here take the receipt view, which is the conservative direction because it reports more tax rather than less, and the page says so rather than implying the question is closed.