Staking, airdrops and NFTs in New Zealand: how the IRD taxes your crypto income in 2026

Because the IRD treats crypto as property and there's no separate capital gains tax, earned crypto is taxed as ordinary income. The key timing rule is that most rewards are taxable when you receive them, valued in New Zealand dollars at the market price on the day they arrive in your wallet.

That NZD figure does double duty. It's the income you declare now, and it also becomes your cost basis for the future. So when you later sell or swap those tokens, you calculate a separate gain or loss based on how the price moved since you received them. You're not taxed twice on the same amount, but you do have two distinct tax moments to track: income on receipt, then gain or loss on disposal.

If you stake Ethereum, Solana or any other proof-of-stake asset and receive rewards, those rewards are income in the year you receive them. You need to record the NZD value of each reward on the day it arrives. The IRD's published view is that staking is a consensus mechanism and is therefore treated much like mining, so the rewards are taxed as income on receipt.

The same logic applies to lending and yield. If you lend crypto through a protocol like Aave or Compound and earn interest, that interest is taxable income when it's credited to you. Rewards from liquidity pools, liquid staking and other DeFi activities are ordinary income when they hit your wallet. One useful detail: transaction fees you pay in order to earn that income are generally deductible expenses, so keep track of them.

This is where New Zealand has a genuinely important nuance that trips up a lot of people. How an airdrop is taxed depends on whether you actively claimed it or passively received it.

If you actively did something to claim an airdrop, it's treated as taxable income on receipt, at its NZD market value. If, on the other hand, tokens simply appeared in your wallet without you lifting a finger, the position is different: they may not be taxed on receipt, but they're taxable when you sell them, with a zero cost basis, meaning the full sale amount is taxable income at that point.

There's a further layer. Because the IRD's general position is that people acquire crypto with the purpose of disposing of it, disposing of airdropped tokens is often a taxable event even for a non-business holder. It may be possible to argue you didn't acquire them for disposal, for example tokens you genuinely never asked for and didn't know you had, but the burden is on you to prove the original purpose. Hard forks, where a chain splits and you receive new units, are in most situations unlikely to be taxable on receipt.

The IRD hasn't yet released specific guidance on DeFi protocols, but that doesn't mean your DeFi activity is untaxed. Quite the opposite. Based on existing principles, rewards from yield farming, liquidity providing and lending are treated as income when received, and disposals within DeFi transactions can trigger taxable events just like any other swap.

Be especially careful with the idea that «passive» DeFi is safe. The IRD has indicated that even passive staking through DeFi protocols may, in certain circumstances, be classified as business income if your activity is systematic and organised enough. The absence of a dedicated circular is not a loophole.

NFTs follow the same income tax rules as other crypto. Buying an NFT with crypto is a disposal of that crypto: if the ETH you spend has risen in value since you acquired it, you owe tax on that gain. Selling an NFT at a profit is taxable income.

Creating and selling NFTs is where it gets more involved. If you create NFTs and sell them, that income is taxable as business income. And here's the New Zealand-specific wrinkle: while crypto assets themselves are excluded from GST, services and certain NFT sales are not. Selling NFTs to buyers inside New Zealand may bring GST into play if your sales exceed the 60,000 dollar GST registration threshold. Sales to buyers outside New Zealand are generally zero-rated. Given how hard it can be to determine where an NFT buyer is located, this is an area to document carefully.

Tracking every reward, valuing it in NZD on the right day, and separating income from later gains is exactly the kind of work that's tedious and error-prone by hand, particularly across multiple protocols and wallets. SafeTax imports your history from more than 500 exchanges and wallets, identifies your staking, lending and airdrop income, values each reward in NZD at the date of receipt, applies your cost basis to later disposals, and gives you a report ready to drop into your IR3. It takes a few minutes, with no subscription and a single payment per report.

And something we care about deeply: SafeTax runs on zero data retention. Once your report is generated, your transactions aren't stored anywhere. Your tax information stays yours, and no one else's.

To get your New Zealand crypto income sorted, head to safetax.io.