EU investment taxes by country & instrument

Everything below follows from this table. A duration country rewards you for doing nothing; a flat country is completely indifferent to how long you hold, so your only lever is the instrument you choose.

Read the third column, not the second. Czechia shows 0% but needs three years; Croatia shows 12% but goes to zero at two. And note how little the 1-month / 6-month / 1-year distinction matters anywhere: outside Luxembourg, Slovakia and Portugal's 365-day line, no European regime changes anything inside the first year.

Every figure above is personal income tax, and a named holding period means how long you held the asset. Czechia's second number is the one people misread: 3 years applies to shares in an a.s. and 5 to shares in an s.r.o. — it's the legal form of the company you sold, not what you are. None of these exemptions pass through to a company investing its own cash — see the “Investing company cash” topic for that.

Two genuine outliers. Croatia exempts bond interest entirely, regardless of issuer — so a bond held past two years there is completely tax-free, coupon and gain. And UK gilts are exempt from CGT, which makes a low-coupon gilt bought below par a mostly tax-free way to hold duration for a higher-rate taxpayer. Everywhere else, bonds are taxed like everything else, and Italy's 12.5% white-list rate (BTP, Bund, UST) is a deliberate 13.5-point subsidy for lending to governments.

There's a structural reason FX gets no relief anywhere, and it isn't the tax code — it's the leverage. A 30:1 position is wiped out by a 3.3% adverse move, which is less than a typical major pair's six-week range, and negative carry at that leverage burns several percent of capital per month. So a levered FX position cannot survive long enough to reach any duration exemption — it permanently occupies the most expensive tax bracket available to it. The one real escape is the UK spread bet, which HMRC classifies as gambling and therefore taxes at zero: the only mainstream 0% route to levered FX in Europe.

1. 🇱🇺 Luxembourg — six months and you're free. Gains on movable assets are exempt once held >6 months, provided you're not a “large” shareholder (broadly <10% of the company). No other European regime asks for so little patience — Slovakia wants a year, Croatia two, Czechia three, Slovenia fifteen. For any normal retail position this is effectively a 0% jurisdiction with a two-quarter wait.
2. 🇭🇷 Croatia — a hard cliff at 730 days, plus tax-free bonds. 12% below two years, 0% above; city surtax abolished 1 Jan 2024, so 12% is all-in. The optimal structure is almost too clean: an accumulating UCITS ETF held past two years pays nothing at all, because accumulation converts 12%-taxed distributions into an exempt capital gain. Watch two catches: losses are same-calendar-year only (no carry-forward), and filing/payment is due by the end of February. A Croatian Investment Account — tax-free, no minimum, €250k lifetime contribution cap — is planned for 1 Jan 2027.
3. 🇮🇪 Ireland — the worst place in Europe to hold an ETF. Exit tax on UCITS ETFs is 38% (cut from 41% on 1 Jan 2026), and the 8-year deemed disposal taxes your unrealised gain every eight years whether you sell or not — then repeats. The €1,270 annual exemption doesn't apply to ETFs, and a loss on one ETF cannot offset a gain on another. Individual shares are treated better: 33% CGT, exemption applies, losses offsettable. Ireland is the one country where the tax code actively pushes you from indexing toward stock-picking.
4. 🇬🇧 UK — three separate zero-rate routes. (1) An ISA shelters £20,000/yr with no CGT, no income tax and no reporting. (2) Gilts are CGT-exempt (the coupon is still income). (3) Spread betting is tax-free. Outside those, CGT is 18%/24% with a thin £3,000 annual exempt amount — so the wrapper does essentially all the work.
5. 🇮🇹 Italy — taxes the wrapper, never the clock. 26% on day one and in year twenty. Two things move the needle instead. First, 12.5% on white-list government bonds (BTP, Bund, UST) versus 26% on everything else. Second, a one-directional trap: harmonised ETF gains are redditi di capitale — taxed gross, and cannot be offset by losses — while ETF losses are redditi diversi and remain usable. So individual stocks strictly dominate ETFs for anyone carrying losses. Add IVAFE at ~0.2%/yr on foreign accounts, a 4-year loss carry-forward (better than Croatia's), and 33% on crypto from 1 Jan 2026.
6. 🇧🇪 Belgium — the free ride ended in 2026. Historically 0% CGT for private investors; from 1 Jan 2026 a 10% tax on financial-asset gains applies, with a €10,000 annual exemption (indexed, and rising €1,000/yr up to €15,000 for those who don't use it). Gains that accrued before 1 Jan 2026 are grandfathered out, so only the new increment is caught. Losses are same-year only. Still cheap by Western-European standards — just no longer free.
7. 🇧🇬 Bulgaria — 0% on UCITS ETFs, with no waiting. 10% flat in general, but disposals of instruments on EU-regulated markets — which covers UCITS ETFs — are exempt outright. For a pure index investor Bulgaria behaves like a 0% jurisdiction with no holding-period condition at all, which is rarer than the headline 10% suggests.
8. 🇪🇸 Spain — the traspaso rule, which excludes ETFs. Spanish residents can switch between fondos de inversión (mutual funds) with full tax deferral — no disposal, no tax event, indefinitely. ETFs are excluded. So Spain is the mirror image of Ireland: its code pushes you toward pooled mutual funds and away from ETFs. Rates are a progressive savings base, 19% → 30%, with no duration relief.

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands taxes a deemed return on your wealth (Box 3), not the gain you actually made — you can pay tax in a losing year. Reform toward actual returns is in progress.
• 🇵🇹 Portugal is the one flat regime with a short-term penalty: gains on assets held <365 days are pulled into progressive rates (up to ~53%) if your total income sits in the top bracket. Crypto held >1 year is 0%.
• 🇩🇪 Germany's 26.375% is softened by Teilfreistellung — 30% of equity-fund gains are exempt, so the effective rate on an equity ETF is ~18.5%. The Sparerpauschbetrag shelters only €1,000/yr.
• 🇲🇨 Monaco · 🇨🇾 Cyprus · 🇲🇹 Malta · 🇨🇭 Switzerland are genuinely 0% — but the exemption is a function of residency, and each carries its own substitute cost (Swiss wealth tax, Cypriot/Maltese non-dom conditions, Monaco's residency bar).
• Nowhere in Europe is there a US-style long-term/short-term split at one year. The only meaningful thresholds are Luxembourg's 6 months, Slovakia's and Portugal's 1 year, Croatia's 2, Czechia's 3, and Slovenia's 15.

1. If you live in a duration regime (LU, SK, HR, CZ, SI) the whole game is holding past the line, in accumulating funds so that income converts into an exempt gain.
2. If you live in a flat regime (IT, DE, ES, IE, FR, NL, DK) patience earns you nothing — optimise the instrument and the wrapper instead: govt bonds in Italy, ISAs in the UK, mutual funds in Spain, direct shares in Ireland.
3. Leveraged FX is the worst-treated instrument almost everywhere, because it structurally cannot survive long enough to reach the relief. The UK spread bet is the sole mainstream exception.

Orientation, not tax advice — rates and rules are an August 2026 snapshot, change frequently, and turn on personal circumstances (residency, domicile, professional vs retail status, account location). Two items to confirm locally before acting on them: the breadth of Croatia's bond-interest exemption, and whether a given country's duration exemption extends cleanly to foreign UCITS ETFs — several sources hedge on that point. Always check with a local adviser before structuring anything around a number here.