The previous article dealt with spot trading, meaning the case where you genuinely own the asset. Before that we covered contracts for difference. This article is about futures and above all about perpetual futures. Options are a separate category with their own paragraph in the Act and we deal with them in the next article.
What a futures contract is
A future is a standardised agreement to buy or sell an underlying at a future date for a price agreed today. Three things separate it from a CFD. It trades on an exchange against an anonymous counterparty rather than against a provider quoting its own price. The contract parameters are set by the exchange. And settlement is guaranteed by a clearing house that steps in between buyer and seller.
Margin on a future is neither a down payment nor a loan. It is a performance bond. The exchange revalues the position daily and the difference against the previous settlement price is credited to or debited from the account each day. Gains and losses therefore accrue continuously rather than only on closing.
How futures are classified
By underlying there are commodity contracts (oil, gold, wheat), financial contracts (equity indices, currencies, interest rates, single shares) and, since December 2017, contracts on crypto-assets on regulated exchanges. By expiry there are contracts with a fixed settlement date and perpetual futures, which have no expiry at all.
The third split matters most for tax purposes. A physically settled contract ends in delivery of the underlying, a cash-settled one only in payment of the monetary difference.
Exchange-traded futures, taking ES as the example
The E-mini S&P 500 trades on CME under the symbol ES. The label ES1! familiar from charting platforms is not a contract in itself but a continuous series always made up of the nearest active month. The chart is stitched together at each roll even though two different contracts are involved.
The multiplier is 50 USD per index point. The minimum price increment is 0.25 of a point, meaning 12.50 USD per contract. Expiry is quarterly in March, June, September and December, usually on the third Friday of the month, and settlement is in cash against the spot value of the index.
With the index at 6,800 points, one contract represents exposure of 340,000 USD. Initial margin on ES sits in the region of five per cent of notional, which corresponds to leverage of roughly twenty times. A one per cent move in the index therefore moves the posted margin by about twenty per cent.
A contract with a fixed expiry has to be rolled before that date. A roll is not one operation but the closing of one contract and the opening of another, so two taxable events.
Taxation of exchange-traded futures
For an individual who is not carrying on a business, income from trading futures is income from derivative transactions under section 8(1)(k) of the Income Tax Act. The Financial Administration places forex trades bearing the features of a derivative transaction under the same paragraph, and the same logic applies to exchange-traded futures.
The consequences are identical to those for CFDs. The one-year test under section 9(1)(k) does not apply, because it is drafted for sales of securities under paragraph (e). The 500 euro exemption does not apply, because under section 9(1)(i) it reaches only paragraphs (d) to (f). The type B return asks for income and expenses rather than the net result, and where expenses for the year exceed income, the difference is disregarded.
The exception is a physically settled contract. On delivery of the underlying you acquire property, and its later sale is assessed according to what that property is. With a contract on a crypto-asset the other side of the trade therefore lands in the regime under section 8(1)(t). A retail trader rarely reaches delivery, because brokers force-close positions before expiry, but the distinction is worth checking in the contract specification.
Perpetual futures and funding
A perpetual future has no expiry. That creates a problem of its own: without a date on which the contract price must meet spot, the quote can drift arbitrarily far from the market. The answer is the funding rate.
Funding is a periodic payment between long and short positions, on most platforms every eight hours. When the contract trades above spot, the rate is positive and longs pay shorts. When it trades below, shorts pay longs. The rate has an interest component and a premium component, the latter reflecting the deviation from the index, and both are normally capped.
The point that matters is that funding is not paid to the exchange but to the counterparties, and the exchange charges its trading fee separately. It is also settled only against whoever holds the position at the exact settlement timestamp.
Long, short and what leverage actually means
A long position gains when the price rises, a short when it falls. With perpetual futures a short is not a matter of borrowing a coin and selling it. You borrow nothing and transfer nothing, you simply enter the contract on the other side.
Leverage is the ratio of the notional value of the position to the margin allocated to it. At ten times leverage, a position with a notional value of 100,000 carries margin of 10,000. It is not a loan from the exchange and no interest is charged on it. Leverage determines how much of your own capital is tied up and how close the position sits to liquidation. Under isolated margin only the allocated amount stands behind the position, under cross margin the entire free balance of the account does.
How liquidation is calculated
Liquidation happens when the margin value falls below the maintenance margin. It is not triggered by the last traded price but by the mark price, which the exchange derives from an index built from several spot markets. That is a safeguard against positions being liquidated by a deliberate push through a thin order book.
The simplified formula for isolated margin looks like this:
liquidation price, long = entry price × (1 − 1 / leverage + maintenance margin rate)
liquidation price, short = entry price × (1 + 1 / leverage − maintenance margin rate)
An example. Entry at 100,000, twenty times leverage, maintenance margin of 0.5 %. The calculation 100,000 × (1 − 0.05 + 0.005) gives 95,500. The long is liquidated on a fall of 4.5 %.
At fifty times leverage the liquidation price comes out at 98,300, a fall of 1.7 %. At a hundred times it is 99,500, a fall of half a per cent. The formula deliberately leaves out fees and accrued funding, both of which push the threshold closer still.
Below the liquidation price sits the bankruptcy price, at which margin is zero. If the position cannot be closed better than that, the exchange insurance fund covers the shortfall, and where even that is not enough, auto-deleveraging follows, in which the exchange force-closes profitable positions on the opposite side of the market.
The chain reaction of October 2025 ran exactly on this mechanic. The first wave of liquidations generated sell orders, those pushed the mark price lower and the next wave followed. Open interest across the major exchanges fell within a single day from 217 to 123 billion dollars.
Taxation of perpetual futures
A perpetual future is a derivative. No underlying is delivered and only the monetary difference is settled, so income of an individual who is not carrying on a business falls under section 8(1)(k), exactly as with CFDs and exchange-traded futures. It is not a sale of a crypto-asset under section 8(1)(t), because no crypto-asset is transferred.
The regulatory side supports the same conclusion. In a public statement of 24 February 2026 ESMA said that the commercial name perpetual futures is irrelevant to categorisation under MiFID II, and that a derivative giving leveraged exposure which is not settled exclusively in physical form is likely to fall within the scope of the product intervention measures on CFDs. The presence of a funding mechanism changes nothing in that assessment. For a retail client in the union this means a leverage cap of 2:1 on crypto-assets, negative balance protection and automatic close-out when margin falls to 50 % of the initial requirement. An offer of a hundred times leverage to a Slovak retail client does not meet those conditions. The tax classification of the income, however, does not depend on the provider's licence.
Two items belong in the return and are routinely forgotten. Funding received is income from a derivative transaction. Funding paid is an expense under section 8(11) as a payment connected with carrying out the transaction. Both directions go in gross and must not be netted against each other.
A liquidation is the closing of a position, not a loss of property outside the tax system. The margin extinguished in it is an expense connected with the settlement of a derivative transaction. There is no mechanism by which a liquidated position drops out of the return.
Two tax layers on one account
This is where most of the errors arise in processing. The result of the derivative belongs under paragraph (k). The collateral in which the account is denominated has a tax life of its own under paragraph (t).
On a stablecoin-margined account that means three separate things. Buying the stablecoin with another crypto-asset is a sale under section 2(ai) and is taxed under paragraph (t). Trading the perpetual futures themselves is a derivative transaction under paragraph (k). Moving the stablecoin later into euros or into another coin is a sale under paragraph (t) again. The same split applies to an inverse contract margined directly in the coin.
In practice the supporting figure is often a single number: how much the account balance rose or fell. It contains the result of the derivative transactions together with the price movement of the collateral and is not the correct value for either of the two categories. A loss in one is not set off against a gain in the other, so their difference is not a usable tax figure either.
Reporting follows the same line. Since 1 January 2026 licensed crypto-asset service providers report data under the DAC 8 directive. A derivative transaction as such falls outside that regime, while a transfer of a crypto-asset onto the trading account and back through a licensed provider may well be a reportable item. That leaves a trace of the collateral movements without a trace of the trading result.
A worked example
A trader closed three hundred and forty perpetual futures positions in 2026. Positive settlements totalled 128,000 €, negative settlements together with trading fees 124,800 €. Over the year they received funding of 2,100 € and paid funding of 3,400 €.
The income column takes 130,100 €, the expense column 128,200 €. The tax base is 1,900 €. Tax in the first band at 19 % is 361 €, the health contribution at 16 % is 304 €, together 665 €, which is 35 % of the gain.
The account itself was funded before trading began by exchanging bitcoin for 20,000 stablecoins. That exchange is separate income under section 8(1)(t), measured at market value on the day of the exchange, and has nothing to do with the derivative tax.
The duty to file is assessed on total taxable income rather than on profit. For 2026 the threshold is 2,983.37 €. A trader with gross income of 130,100 € clears it even in a year that ends at a loss.
What to record
The Act does not prescribe a form of record keeping, but it does require that the figures can be evidenced on inspection. For every position you need the date and time of opening and closing, the instrument, the direction, the size, the entry and exit price, the settlement amount, fees and the settlement currency. For liquidated positions the liquidation fee belongs in the record too. Funding is recorded separately in both directions. Where income arises in a foreign currency, it is converted under section 31(2).
Download your exports during the year rather than after it. Most platforms expose trade history and funding history in two different files, and some limit export depth to a few months back. The annual summary statement usually shows a single net result, from which the two columns of the return cannot be reconstructed. Accounts denominated in a stablecoin add a further requirement, the acquisition cost records under section 25b that we cover in the article on crypto taxation in Slovakia.
This article is a general overview, not individual tax advice, and it is neither an investment nor a product recommendation. Processing exports from derivative platforms, reconstructing funding and separating income under section 8(1)(k) from crypto-asset disposals under paragraph (t) are routine parts of the work kryptotax.sk does for clients. 🇸🇰