When the money crosses a border

Getting paid in crypto

A client pays in USDT. Nothing in Philippine tax law was written with that in mind. Here is what actually exists, and the widely-repeated number you should ignore.

What most sources get wrong

Commonly said: That crypto is taxed at a flat 15% capital gains tax on disposal, a figure repeated across exchange blogs and forum answers.
What is actually the case: That 15% is real but it belongs to a different asset. It is the rate on gains from shares of stock in a domestic corporation not traded on the local exchange, recently extended to unlisted foreign-corporation shares. Nothing found extends it to virtual assets. Crypto received as payment for services is income, and the BIR has issued nothing that tells you how to value or report it.; NIRC §24(C); the absence of any crypto-specific BIR issuance

The finding that matters most

No Revenue Regulation, Revenue Memorandum Circular or published ruling addresses the income-tax treatment of cryptocurrency received as payment for services. Three independent professional sources confirm the same gap.

That is not a research shortfall, it is the state of the law. Everything below labelled as analogy is inference from general principles, and this page marks it that way rather than dressing it up as guidance.

What exists instead

Gross income is defined broadly enough to include payment in any form.
The definition covers compensation for services in whatever form paid. Being paid in tokens rather than pesos does not put the receipt outside income.
NIRC §32(A)
Valuing non-cash pay at fair market value on receipt is an analogy, not a rule written for you.
The fair-market-value-when-received principle comes from the employee-compensation withholding regulations. Commentary extends it to crypto and to business income. It is a sensible extension and it is still an extension, because that regulation is about employee compensation and not about freelance or business income.
RR 2-98 §2.78.1, applied by analogy
The BSP's virtual-asset rules are about service providers, not about you.
BSP Circular 1108 regulates virtual asset service providers: exchanges, custodians and transfer agents operating as a business for other people. A freelancer receiving crypto as payment, without facilitating transactions for others commercially, falls outside its scope. The canonical PDF was not retrievable while this page was written, so this rests on secondary corroboration.
BSP Circular No. 1108 (2021), via secondary sources
The BIR's foreign-exchange conversion rules do not mention crypto at all.
RMC 12-2024 sets conversion rules for foreign-currency transactions generally, pointing at published bank association spot rates with the BSP as fallback. It is the closest existing framework for valuation timing, and it was not written with virtual assets in mind. It does not, on its face, cover an asset with no published peso rate from either source.
RMC No. 12-2024

The claim to actively ignore

Multiple exchange blogs assert a flat 15% capital gains tax on crypto disposal. The rate exists. It applies to gains on shares of stock in a domestic corporation not traded through the local exchange, under NIRC §24(C), and RA 12214 recently extended it to unlisted foreign-corporation shares.

Nothing found extends it to virtual assets. It is an analogy that propagated across low-authority sources until it started to read like a rule. If you are relying on a 15% figure because you saw it repeated, the repetition is the only support it has.

What to do in the meantime

Record the receipt as income at a peso value you can defend, capture the rate source and the timestamp you used, and keep both. TaxKaya stores one exchange-rate snapshot per transaction, and for a crypto receipt there is no BIR-sanctioned source to point that snapshot at, so the defensible thing is consistency plus a paper trail rather than a specific right answer.

If crypto is a material part of your income rather than an occasional payment, this is a question for a professional. The gap here is real, and a guide page cannot close it.

Still unsettled

Nobody has answered these. Where the answer would change what you owe, that is a question for a professional or a formal BIR ruling request, not for a guide page.

What exchange rate and timestamp are acceptable?

What is known: RMC 12-2024 establishes the general shape of the answer for foreign currency: a published rate, from a named source, at a defined time.
Where it stops: Genuinely undefined for crypto. There is no BIR-sanctioned rate source for an asset with no bank-association or BSP peso quote. Pick one source, use it consistently, and keep the evidence.

Can crypto payment support VAT zero-rating?

What is known: Zero-rating requires payment in acceptable foreign currency, inwardly remitted and accounted for under BSP rules.
Where it stops: No ruling addresses it. The plain text suggests it probably cannot, since crypto is not routed through a bank the way a wire transfer is, but that reading is inference and not confirmed guidance.

Is there a second taxable event when you later sell the tokens?

What is known: A two-stage framework, income on receipt then gain or loss on disposal, is how commentary describes crypto mining income.
Where it stops: Extending that to crypto received for services is a reasonable analogy and an unconfirmed one. No BIR issuance establishes it, and no issuance mandates a cost-basis method either, despite a claim to that effect circulating.

The forms this touches

Sources

Checked against BIR rules on Aug 6, 2026

Knowing the rule is half of it. Knowing what you owe under it, before the deadline, is the other half.

Work out what you file

Practical guidance, not legal or tax advice. Every claim above names what it rests on, and where a claim rests on secondary reporting rather than a primary text, it says so. Rules move; check the review date before relying on a figure.