Got an Airdrop or Staking Reward? Indonesia Taxes It Differently Than a Regular Crypto Sale
6 min read
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6 min read
You didn't buy anything. A project you barely remember signing up for dropped fifty tokens into your wallet, or your validator paid out a small reward for the coins you had locked up. Free money, it feels like. It probably isn't free of tax.
Airdrop and staking reward tax in Indonesia does not work the way most people assume, and it does not work the way selling crypto works either. If you have only ever heard about Indonesia's flat 0.21% crypto tax, that number does not apply here at all. A different rule, at a much higher rate, can apply the moment the tokens arrive, before you have sold anything.
Since 1 August 2025, Indonesia's crypto tax has run on PMK 50/2025, a regulation from the Ministry of Finance. For a normal trade, it is simple: sell, swap or trade crypto on a licensed Indonesian platform and a final income tax (PPh) of 0.21% of the transaction value is deducted automatically. Use a foreign, unappointed platform instead and the rate is 1%, and paying it becomes your own responsibility rather than the platform's (Ministry of Finance, PMK 50/2025, effective 1 August 2025, via Direktorat Jenderal Pajak).
"Final tax" is a specific term. It means that once the 0.21% or 1% is paid on a transaction, that transaction is done as far as your annual tax return is concerned. You do not add it again as regular income.
The Directorate General of Taxes has confirmed that PMK 50/2025's scope was deliberately widened beyond simple buy-and-sell trades to also name NFTs, staking, airdrops, reward tokens, utility tokens and crypto-to-crypto swaps as covered objects (Direktorat Jenderal Pajak, "PMK 50/2025: Babak Baru Pemajakan Aset Kripto," retrieved 13 August 2026). That is where the confusion starts. Being named inside the same regulation does not mean airdrops and staking get the same 0.21% rate. It means something else, and for airdrops specifically, something already reasonably well defined.
Receiving an airdrop is not a trade. Nothing was bought or sold, so the 0.21% transaction tax has nothing to apply to. Instead, Indonesian tax authorities treat a free airdrop the way they treat any other windfall: as "penghasilan lain" ("other income") under Article 4 of the Income Tax Law (UU PPh). The reasoning is straightforward. You received something with real market value and paid nothing for it, so your economic capacity went up, and that increase is taxable the moment it happens (klikpajak.id, "Pajak Cryptocurrency Indonesia," retrieved 13 August 2026).
Two things follow from that:
| Annual taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| Up to Rp60,000,000 | 5% |
| Rp60,000,000 to Rp250,000,000 | 15% |
| Rp250,000,000 to Rp500,000,000 | 25% |
| Rp500,000,000 to Rp5,000,000,000 | 30% |
| Above Rp5,000,000,000 | 35% |
Depending on how much other income you already have, the same airdrop could cost you anywhere from 5% to 35% in tax, and none of it is the flat rate people assume applies to all crypto.
Staking is murkier, and it is worth being honest about that rather than pretending there is a clean answer. PMK 50/2025 names staking as an object it covers, but it does not spell out how staking income should be valued, when exactly it becomes taxable, or how it should be reported. Ahmad Rif'an, a tax counselor (Penyuluh Pajak) at the Directorate General of Taxes, told DDTC News directly that the treatment of staking income "needs to be studied in more detail together with the relevant authority," meaning the regulation itself does not settle it yet (DDTC News, "PMK 50/2025 Tak Muat Aturan Soal Staking Aset Kripto, Ini Kata DJP," retrieved 13 August 2026).
Say you are staking Ethereum and a reward worth Rp8,000,000 (based on the token's market price that day) lands in your wallet, and this income sits inside the 15% bracket once combined with the rest of what you earned that year. That reward alone could add roughly Rp1,200,000 to your tax bill, and it adds that the year you received it, whether or not you ever sell the coins.
Rp8,000,000 (fair market value at receipt) × 15% (your income bracket) = Rp1,200,000
Now say you later sell that same reward on a licensed Indonesian exchange for Rp10,000,000. That sale is a separate, second tax event, this time under PMK 50/2025's transaction rule: 0.21% of Rp10,000,000, or about Rp21,000, withheld automatically by the platform.
Same tokens, two completely different tax bills, calculated two different ways, at two different points in time. This hypothetical uses round numbers to illustrate the mechanism only; your own tax owed depends on your total income for the year and should be worked out with a tax consultant, not estimated from an example.
The 0.21% transaction tax gets deducted automatically by a licensed exchange, so most traders never think about it. Airdrop and staking income does not work that way. Indonesia runs a self-assessment tax system, meaning you are responsible for calculating, reporting and paying tax on income like this yourself, in your annual SPT Tahunan, under the "Penghasilan Lainnya" (other income) section. No platform files it for you, and if you never received it through an Indonesian exchange in the first place, no platform even knows it happened.
If you hold staked or airdropped tokens, the first useful step is simply knowing what you have and when it arrived, since the date determines the token's taxable value. NetWort's asset page for Ethereum shows historical prices, which is exactly what you need to work out the fair market value on the day a staking reward or airdrop landed. Track the tokens themselves on your Holdings page so the record exists before tax season, not after. If you also want the fuller picture on how staking yield stacks up against its risk in the first place, staking crypto for passive yield covers that separately.