Fewer than 1% of CGT payers accounted for 45% of a record £24.2bn bill

HM Revenue & Customs published its annual capital gains tax statistics on Thursday 27 August 2026. Liabilities for the 2024-25 tax year came to £24.2 billion, up 89% on the year before, on £127 billion of declared gains, up 82%. The number of people paying the tax rose 45% to 584,000, an all-time high.

The distribution is the part worth reading twice. Fewer than 1% of CGT payers, those with gains above £5 million, accounted for 45% of the total liability. At the other end, roughly half of all payers had gains under £25,000 and between them contributed less than 2%. London and the South East produced 49% of gains and 50% of the liability.

Why the numbers moved

HMRC attributes the jump to policy rather than to asset performance. The main rates rose midway through the year, from 10% and 20% to 18% and 24%. The annual exempt amount had been cut in successive years and now stands at £3,000. The announcement that the Business Asset Disposal Relief rate would rise from April 2025 pushed business owners to complete sales early: BADR-eligible disposals went from 42,000 to 61,000, a 45% increase. And speculation about rate rises before the Autumn Budget 2024 encouraged people to sell before anything changed.

Laurence Field, corporate tax partner at Crowe, put it bluntly to Spear’s: “In many ways it’s the dream solution for a revenue-hungry government; prompt people to think rates will rise and encourage them to realise assets and pay tax.”

Mark Jephcott of Utmost told Financial Planning Today that the open question for the Treasury is how much activity was pulled forward, and whether that leaves a thinner few years of disposals behind it. The Office for Budget Responsibility currently forecasts CGT receipts of £34.9 billion by 2030-31, revised up from £29.8 billion in its November 2025 forecast, mostly on the back of higher expected equity prices.

The release also broke out cryptoasset gains separately for the first time: 17,600 taxpayers declared £1.38 billion, with more than half of that produced by under 2% of them.

The exit question

Pete Fairchild, Crowe’s national head of private clients, told Spear’s that continued uncertainty over tax changes narrows the UK’s appeal. Alex Ruffel, a private client partner at Farrer & Co, was more measured. She thinks talk of an exodus is “exaggerated to some degree”, but said she is increasingly hearing from long-standing UK business owners who have never lived anywhere else and are now worried about an exit tax. If that worry spreads, it produces the same short-term effect as the 2024 speculation did: people sell UK assets before they leave, CGT receipts spike, and the Treasury collects less from them afterwards.

What it means for family offices

A tax base where 1% of payers supply 45% of the yield is a tax base built on a small number of large, discretionary transactions. Family offices sit on both sides of that: they advise on the timing of those disposals and they hold the assets. The 2024-25 figures show what happens when a cohort with real control over timing reads the same signal at the same moment, and the Budget scheduled for this autumn will produce another such signal.

Two practical consequences. First, the pull-forward effect is now documented well enough that a family office should assume its own realisation calendar is being modelled by the Treasury, not just by its advisers. Second, the BADR numbers are a reminder that relief changes announced with a lead time do not delay behaviour, they accelerate it. Where a family holds a trading business it expects to sell within the next few years, the planning question is no longer only what the rate will be but when the announcement lands.

Sources: HM Revenue & Customs, Capital Gains Tax statistics commentary; Spear’s; Financial Planning Today; Professional Adviser.