The question we get most often goes like this: do I pay tax when I withdraw money from a crypto card? The answer is no, and also yes. The ATM withdrawal itself does not create the tax. The tax arises one step earlier or one step later, depending on how the card is built. And that is where it is decided whether your tax return will be a matter of one email or a matter of two weeks of reconstructing history.
The taxable event is not the withdrawal but the exchange
The Slovak Income Tax Act does not work with the concept of a cash withdrawal. It works with the concept of disposing of a crypto-asset. Under Section 2 letter ai) of the Act, the taxable moment is the exchange of a crypto-asset for property, for another crypto-asset, for a service, or its transfer for consideration. What matters is the exchange, not the movement of money in an account.
Several practical conclusions follow. Buying crypto with euro is not a taxable event. Holding crypto is not. Moving coins from an exchange to your own wallet is not. But paying for lunch with a card that sells part of your Bitcoin at that moment is a taxable event, exactly as if you had clicked the sell button on an exchange.
Income arising this way is taxed for an individual under Section 8(1)(t) of the Act as other income. In 2026 a four-band progressive rate from 19 % to 35 % applies, plus a 16 % health insurance contribution. At higher amounts the combined burden approaches 51 %. The tax base is the difference between the income and the demonstrably incurred expense, with the input price of the crypto-asset determined under Section 25b of the Act. Where the same crypto-asset was acquired gradually at different prices, the acquisition cost is in practice determined using a weighted arithmetic average.
There is no holding-period test for directly held crypto. It does not help that you have held that particular Bitcoin since 2018. And a warning about something that is still cited incorrectly: the preferential 7 % rate for crypto held longer than a year was indeed passed in 2023, but it was repealed before it was due to take effect on 1 January 2024 and never came into force. Anyone offering it to you as an argument is working with legislation that does not exist.
Two technically similar models with completely different tax records
Cards with a crypto balance come in two types, and the difference between them matters more for your records than the cashback rate or the annual fee.
A card that converts at the moment of payment. You spend directly from the crypto balance and the provider sells the required amount when the transaction happens. Every individual payment is a separate taxable sale. Every one. Including the ATM withdrawal, including the 1.20 € parking fee and the 9.99 € monthly subscription. If you use the card as your main payment method, a year produces several hundred to a thousand micro-sales, and each one needs an acquisition cost for the amount sold and the exchange rate at the time of the transaction.
A card prefunded in euro. The crypto is sold once, when you top the card up, and from then on you are spending a euro balance. The taxable event only arises at top-up. Top the card up four times a year and you have four taxable events, four exchange rates and four lines in your records for the entire year.
To be clear, the total tax is the same in both models. This is not tax optimisation in the sense of a lower bill. It is about the volume of record keeping, about whether the supporting documents can be reconstructed at all, and about the risk that during an audit you cannot prove the acquisition cost for one of eight hundred transactions.
A worked example: identical tax, thirty times the paperwork
Say you convert 12 000 € worth of crypto into spending over a year, and you had bought that crypto for 5 000 €. The gain is 7 000 € in both scenarios and the tax plus contributions comes to roughly 2 450 €.
In the first scenario you use a convert-at-payment card for everything: groceries, coffee, fuel, subscriptions. Over a year that is around 600 transactions. For each one you need to establish how much crypto was sold, at what rate, and what its averaged acquisition cost was. You do have the export from the app, but it contains 600 rows that need to be matched against purchases made on three different exchanges.
In the second scenario you top the card up four times a year with 3 000 €, selling crypto at each top-up, and then spend euro only. You have four rows. The tax is the same, the processing time is disproportionately lower and the room for error is minimal.
At small amounts, the administrative burden of the first model is out of all proportion to the tax involved. That is the whole argument.
Which cards fall into which model
As of July 2026, cards operating on the euro prefunding model include the European version of the Crypto.com Prepaid Visa, the Bitrefill Card, which is available in Slovakia, is topped up in euro from BTC, ETH, USDC or BNB and allows both ATM withdrawals and transfers to a Slovak bank account, and the Bitsa Card, where a crypto top-up is likewise converted into euro.
With Crypto.com you have to switch off Auto Top-Up. Left enabled, the card replenishes its balance from crypto on an ongoing basis, which effectively turns the prepaid model into a convert-at-payment model, precisely what you were trying to avoid.
Cards that convert at the moment of payment include MetaMask Card, Gnosis Pay, Deo bank and WeFi, Wirex, Trustee Plus, and cards linked directly to an exchange balance such as Coinbase, Binance or Bybit. These are not bad products. They are simply administratively expensive if you are filing on your own.
Models change and providers adjust their terms, so always verify the current mechanism in the card's terms before opening it. The question for support is simple: do you sell the crypto when the card is topped up, or when a payment is made?
A crypto-backed credit line does not remove the tax, it defers it
A recommendation that comes up often is to spend against a crypto-backed credit line, for instance through Nexo Credit Mode, because drawing on a loan is not a sale. The first part of that is correct. Drawing on a loan secured by crypto is genuinely not an exchange of a crypto-asset, so in itself it does not create a taxable event.
The problem is what goes unsaid. The tax is not removed, only deferred, and it is deferred in a way you no longer control. If the value of the collateral falls and the provider sells it to cover the loan, the taxable sale happens anyway: at the worst possible moment, at the worst possible price and without any decision from you. On top of that, the gain is realised out of a position you wanted to keep.
Three further points. Interest on such a loan is not a deductible expense for an individual, so you cannot offset it against the sale proceeds. Cashback paid in the provider's own tokens is a crypto-asset with a zero acquisition cost, so its later exchange is taxed on the full amount. And the mechanism itself is leverage with liquidation risk, which is not a tool for someone opening their first crypto card.
There is a regulatory dimension too. As of mid-2026 Nexo does not hold a CASP authorisation under MiCA and its applications are still in process. So the advice to prefer a licensed provider and the advice to use Nexo contradict each other. Always check the current position in the CASP register maintained by ESMA, or in the register of the National Bank of Slovakia for Slovak providers.
Card rewards are income too
Cashback and rewards are routinely forgotten with cards. If the provider pays you cashback in a crypto-asset, that is income with a zero acquisition cost. When you later sell it or spend it, the whole amount is taxed, not just the appreciation. It is also worth remembering that exchanging crypto for a stablecoin is an exchange for another crypto-asset, so it is a taxable event even though you never saw a single euro.
When the tax is actually paid
The taxable event arises at the moment of exchange, so with a prepaid card at the moment of top-up. That does not mean you pay anything that day. The income goes into your individual income tax return, type B, for the relevant calendar year. The return is filed by 31 March of the following year, with the option of an extension, and that is when the tax is due. The health insurance contribution is assessed by your insurer in the annual reconciliation. No advance payments are made during the year on this type of income.
During the year, then, there is nothing to do other than keep a record of transactions. With a prepaid card that means noting four data points at every top-up: the date, the amount of crypto sold, the euro sum and the exchange rate. A table with four rows per year is sufficient support.
MiCA and DAC8: the tax authority will see the data anyway
The final MiCA transitional deadline expired on 1 July 2026, and a provider serving clients in the European Economic Area now needs a full CASP authorisation. We covered this in detail in our article on the end of the MiCA transition period. For cards this yields a practical criterion: a licensed provider is safer not only in terms of client protection but also because your data will not vanish from the system when the provider shuts down.
At the same time, reporting under the DAC8 directive and the CARF framework has been running since this year. Licensed EU providers record and report client and transaction data to the tax administration, the first report covers the whole of 2026 and the data is then exchanged automatically between tax authorities. Your return should therefore match what the authority will see regardless. The fact that your provider does not report does not remove your obligation. It only raises the chance that the mismatch surfaces later, with interest attached.
How to open a card and what to set
Opening a card is not technically demanding and involves no software, just a mobile app: registration, KYC with an identity document, a selfie and proof of address, depositing crypto, activating the card in the Card section and switching the mode if needed. It takes a few minutes and nothing is reported to any authority.
Four things are worth holding to when setting it up. Choose the prepaid model with euro top-ups. Switch off automatic replenishment from crypto. Top up in larger amounts less frequently, ideally two to four times a year. And after each top-up save the confirmation and note the rate, ideally in a single table you simply send off for processing at year end.
If the amounts you spend through the card are larger and regular, it is also worth asking whether the whole crypto side of things should sit in an s.r.o., where the tax rate is 10 % on turnover below 100 000 € and no health contributions apply. We set out the comparison in our article on crypto taxation in Slovakia.
This article is a general overview, not individual tax advice, and it is neither investment nor product advice. If you have already been using a convert-at-payment card for a year and your exports run to hundreds of rows, or you simply want to check that your records are set up correctly, kryptotax.sk will prepare your tax return end to end, including processing the exports and determining acquisition costs. Get in touch. 🇸🇰