The 15 December CGT Deadline Irish Traders Keep Missing

General information about tax rules, not tax or legal advice. Rules change and every situation is different: check with a qualified adviser in your country before you file.

It is the first week of December. The year on the MES has gone reasonably well, you are still trading, and you have not thought about tax since you filed something last October. Then somebody in a Discord you barely read mentions that Capital Gains Tax on everything closed between January and November is due on the fifteenth. Not next October. This month.

That is the thing Ireland does differently, and it catches almost everyone in their first year. Most European systems collect capital gains tax after you file: you declare, they assess, you pay. Ireland reverses the order. You pay first, on your own arithmetic, with no assessment and no reminder, and the return that describes what you paid arrives eleven months later.

The rest of the Irish position is unusually simple. One flat rate of 33 % on chargeable gains. One annual personal exemption of €1,270. Self assessment throughout, which means nobody withholds anything and no statement lands telling you what you owe. The difficulty is never the arithmetic. It is the calendar, and the calendar is the part nobody reads until they are already late.

The full calendar, laid out

Ireland divides the tax year into two disposal periods for payment purposes. Everything awkward about the Irish calendar follows from that single division.

• Initial period, 1 January to 30 November. CGT on net gains realised in this window is payable by 15 December of the same year.
• Later period, 1 December to 31 December. CGT on net gains realised in that one month is payable by 31 January of the following year.
• The return. The CGT return covering the whole year is filed by 31 October of the following year: Form CG1 if you are not otherwise a chargeable person, the CGT panels of Form 11 through ROS if you are self assessed.

Look at what that does to a trade closed in February. The tax on it falls due in December of the same year, and the form describing it goes in twenty months after the trade itself. Nothing arrives in between: no assessment, no letter, no figure calculated for you. You work it out, you pay it, and much later you report it.

Payment runs through Revenue, either through myAccount for most individuals or through ROS if you are self assessed. Both accept a CGT payment for a specific period with no return attached, which is exactly the mechanism the December date requires. If your first reaction is to ask how you can possibly pay tax on a return you have not filed, you have understood the system correctly. That is precisely what happens.

One consequence is worth internalising early. The December payment is a payment on account of a liability you formalise much later. If the year deteriorates after you have paid, the return is what puts it right. If you underpay, interest runs from 15 December, not from the day you notice and not from the day you file.

What the 33 % actually attaches to

The charge lands on disposal. For a futures trader that means the moment a position is closed out, not the moment money leaves the broker for your bank account. A profitable year that stays entirely inside the trading account is still a taxable year. Withdrawals are irrelevant to CGT, which genuinely surprises people.

The rate does not care who you are. There is no band structure and no scaling with the rest of your income: somebody on a modest salary and somebody on a large one pay the same 33 % on the same gain. That is harsh at the bottom and comparatively kind at the top, because a higher earner here pays income tax, USC and PRSI on marginal income at a combined rate well above a third.

Costs directly connected to the acquisition and disposal come into the computation. For a futures trader that is commission per contract per side, exchange and clearing fees, and the charges applied when a position is closed. Keep those at transaction level rather than as a monthly figure. A monthly total cannot be attached to a specific disposal, which makes it much weaker evidence if anyone ever asks you to show your work.

What does not come off is the cost of running the operation: the data subscription, the platform licence, the VPS, the third monitor, the indicator package. Those are the cost of the activity rather than the cost of a disposal, and under CGT they are simply your money.

Then the currency point, which is not optional. CME contracts settle in US dollars and your computation has to be in euro. Every realised result needs converting at a rate appropriate to the date of the disposal, not one annual rate applied to a closing balance. The move in EUR/USD between opening and closing is part of your real result whether you watched it or not.

The December arithmetic, with numbers

What follows are illustrative figures, invented to show the shape of the calculation. They are not a projection or a target.

Suppose that, converted to euro at dated rates, a trader's realised results between 1 January and 30 November come to €18,400 of gains and €7,900 of losses, with €1,100 of commission and exchange fees across those trades.

• Net gains before the exemption: 18,400 less 7,900 less 1,100, which is €9,400.
• Deduct the annual personal exemption: 9,400 less 1,270, which is €8,130.
• CGT at 33 %: €2,682.90, payable by 15 December.

Two things fall out of that. The first is the true size of the exemption. At 33 %, €1,270 is worth at most €419.10 of tax in a year. It does not grow, it does not carry forward, and it cannot be transferred to a spouse or civil partner. Three quiet years followed by a good one does not hand you €5,080 of shelter. It hands you €1,270, the same as every other year.

The second is that losses come off before the exemption does, which quietly wastes it for active traders. A year of many winners and many losers that finishes €900 net up pays nothing, and the exemption has done nothing for you either. It only ever protects the first slice of a net positive year.

Turned around, the flat rate makes target setting unusually easy. If you want €30,000 in your hand from your own account in a year, you need roughly €45,000 of net gains before tax. Costs also hurt twice: a €200 monthly data and platform bill is €2,400 a year of after tax money, which needs around €3,600 of gross gains standing behind it. Anything you pay for and do not use is more expensive than the invoice suggests.

How you actually pay it

The mechanics take about twenty minutes once you have done them once. The first time is the only slow one, and it is slow because of the export rather than the payment.

1. Between 1 and 5 December, export every closed position of the year to date from the broker, at transaction level, with dates, contracts, quantities, prices and fees. Do not assume the portal will still have January available in December, because plenty of them do not.
2. Add a euro column using a rate appropriate to each disposal date. Keep the sheet in this order: date, contract, result in dollars, rate, result in euro.
3. Net gains against losses for 1 January to 30 November, subtract the allowable transaction costs, subtract €1,270 if it is still available to you, and take 33 % of what remains.
4. Sign in to myAccount or ROS and make a CGT payment for the initial period of the current year. Check the period you are selecting: paying into the wrong year is a real and irritating error to unwind, and it happens most often at 23:40 on the fourteenth.
5. Save the receipt beside the sheet, then diary two more notes: 31 January for the December period, and 31 October of the following year for the return itself.

If the number comes out at zero because there was no net gain, there is nothing to pay in December beyond keeping the sheet. The return still gets filed the following October, and it matters more in a losing year than in a winning one, for the reason in the next section.

Losses, and what December can and cannot fix

The Irish loss rules are one of the better parts of the system, and they are worth knowing before you need them rather than after.

Allowable losses come off chargeable gains of the same tax year first. Unused losses then carry forward against later gains with no expiry, which means a bad first year is not wasted at all: it is a credit against every profitable year that follows, for as long as it takes to consume. And unlike the exemption, losses can move between jointly assessed spouses and civil partners, so a household where one person is deep in drawdown and the other has a gain on shares is not stuck with two sealed silos. There is no general carry back.

The instruction that falls out of this is blunt: claim your losses in a year where they do you no good whatsoever. A first year trader who loses €6,000, has no tax to pay and therefore files nothing has thrown away a credit worth close to €2,000 of future tax. File it anyway.

Now the December wrinkle, which is the part most people get wrong on their second year rather than their first. Losses realised in December do count in the year's final reckoning and they will reduce the total the return eventually shows. But the 15 December payment was computed on the position at 30 November, without them. Closing a loser on 18 December therefore does not un-pay a bill you settled on the 14th. The correction comes back through the return filed the following October, and between those two dates the money sits with Revenue.

That is a cashflow point rather than a tax point. December losses lower the year's tax; they do not lower the December instalment. Manufacturing trades for tax reasons is also how people turn a €419 saving into a €3,000 loss, so let the tax follow the trading rather than the other way round.

The misses Revenue sees every year

"I will pay when I file." The deadline that matters came first. Interest runs from 15 December regardless of when the CG1 or the Form 11 eventually goes in, and the interest does not care that you intended to be tidy about it in October.

Forgetting that December has its own date. A single good trade on the 20th quietly creates a 31 January liability while everybody is on holidays. It is the most commonly missed of the three dates, because it covers one month only and usually produces a small number.

Wasting the exemption. €1,270 at 33 % is €419.10 a year that expires unused. In a quiet year where you are sitting on a modest unrealised gain you were going to close anyway, closing it before 30 November uses an allowance that otherwise vanishes. That is not a reason to invent a trade.

Reconstructing the year on 14 December. The people who miss the date are almost never the people who refused to pay. They are the people who could not produce a number in time.

Filing nothing in a losing year. The return is required even when no tax is payable, and skipping it is how a loss that should have sheltered three future years turns into nothing at all.

Questions Irish traders actually ask

I made a gain in March and gave it all back in September. Do I still pay in December? You pay on the net position to 30 November. If the September losses cancelled the March gains, there is no net chargeable gain and nothing to pay. Keep the sheet showing it anyway.

I have not withdrawn anything from the broker. Is it still taxable? Yes. The charge attaches to the disposal, not to the transfer. Money that never left the account is taxed identically to money you moved to your bank in April.

What if I cannot afford the payment on 15 December? Pay what you can by the date and engage with Revenue rather than going quiet. Interest on a shortfall is smaller than interest on the whole, and a taxpayer who made contact is in a different conversation.

Do I still need a CG1 if I file a Form 11? No. The self assessed use the CGT panels within the Form 11 through ROS, and the CG1 is for people who are not otherwise chargeable persons.

Which euro rate should I use? A rate appropriate to the date of each disposal, applied consistently across the year, with the source recorded in your sheet. What you should not do is convert a December closing balance at a December rate and call that the year's result.

Could Revenue decide my trading is a trade rather than an investment? It is possible, and then profits are charged to income tax instead, with USC and PRSI on top and full deduction of business expenses in exchange. There is no election and no bright line: it turns on frequency, volume, organisation and how the activity sits alongside the rest of your life. If yours has outgrown one person and one account, get a written view from an Irish adviser before you file.

My broker sends me a US tax form. Does that change the Irish position? Not by itself. An Irish resident is taxable in Ireland on worldwide gains, and paperwork from a US broker does not shift where the charge sits.

The routine that makes all of this boring

• Monthly, fifteen minutes. Export the month, add the euro column at dated rates, append it to one running sheet. This is the entire trick, and everything else is downstream of it.
• First week of December, one hour. Net to 30 November, apply the exemption, pay 33 % through myAccount or ROS, file the receipt.
• Late January, ten minutes. Did you close anything in December at a net gain? If so, pay it by the 31st.
• October of the following year, one hour. File the return, including the years where nothing is payable, and bank any loss carried forward.

Ireland's arithmetic is easy and its calendar is not. One rate at 33 %. One exemption of €1,270, personal, non transferable and gone at the end of every year. Two payment dates, 15 December and 31 January. One filing date, 31 October of the year after. Losses that carry forward indefinitely and that can move between jointly assessed spouses even though the exemption cannot.

So do three things now. Put the first week of December in the calendar with an hour beside it. Keep a running euro sheet of closed positions from January rather than reconstructing a year of fills in a panic. And file a return in every year you trade, including the ones that lost money, because that is how the loss credit gets banked. This is general information and not tax advice: your own circumstances belong with an Irish accountant, and the current figures belong on revenue.ie.

cgt payment deadline ireland 15 december

Educational content, not investment advice. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Any reference to Algomyth results is hypothetical, simulated over historical data, and shown in full on the performance page; past performance does not guarantee future results.