Selling a Losing Crypto Position Won't Lower Your Tax Bill in Indonesia
4 min read
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4 min read
You are holding a token that is down badly this year, and December is close enough to think about it. US investing content has a name for this move: tax-loss harvesting, selling a loser on purpose so the loss cancels out taxable gains elsewhere. It is a real, well-documented strategy for American taxpayers.
Crypto tax-loss harvesting doesn't work that way in Indonesia. Selling a crypto position at a loss changes nothing about your tax bill. To see why, you need to know how Indonesia actually taxes crypto, because it isn't taxing your profit at all.
Since 1 August 2025, crypto transactions in Indonesia have run on PMK 50/2025, a Ministry of Finance regulation. Every time you sell or swap crypto on a licensed Indonesian platform, a final income tax (PPh Pasal 22 Final) of 0.21% is withheld automatically from the transaction value. Use a foreign platform that the tax office (DJP) has appointed as a collector and the rate is 1%; use one that isn't appointed and the 1% obligation falls on you personally to report and pay (Ministry of Finance, PMK 50/2025, via Direktorat Jenderal Pajak). The regulation also scrapped the VAT that used to apply on top.
Read that rate again: 0.21% or 1% of the transaction value, not of your gain. That single detail is the whole answer.
Say you bought ETH for Rp50,000,000 and it has since dropped to Rp38,000,000, a Rp12,000,000 loss. You also sold a different token earlier this year for a Rp80,000,000 gain, and that sale already had its own 0.21% final tax withheld at the time.
If Indonesia worked like the US, selling the ETH position now would offset part of that earlier gain and hand you back some tax:
Rp12,000,000 loss offsetting the earlier Rp80,000,000 gain, taxed at your bracket
That refund never arrives. What actually happens when you sell the ETH is a second, unrelated final tax charge on the sale itself:
Rp38,000,000 (sale value) × 0.21% = Rp79,800 final tax, due regardless of the Rp12,000,000 loss
| If Indonesia worked like the US | What PMK 50/2025 actually does |
|---|---|
| The loss offsets your earlier gain | The earlier gain's tax was already final and settled |
| Selling the loser lowers this year's tax bill | Selling the loser adds its own separate 0.21% charge |
| Tax depends on your net profit for the year | Tax depends only on each sale's transaction value |
If you have read about why selling a losing foreign stock doesn't cut your Indonesian tax bill either, the reasoning there is not quite the same as crypto's, even though the outcome looks similar.
Foreign stock gains are non-final income, folded into your regular earnings and taxed at progressive rates through your annual return. A loss on those stocks genuinely could offset that income in principle, it just isn't allowed to under the current rules. Crypto never reaches that stage. Every crypto sale settles its own final tax at the moment it happens, the same way an IDX-listed share's 0.1% final tax settles at the moment of sale, so there is no year-end pool of taxable profit for a loss to reduce, by design rather than by a rule that happens to exclude it.
Since the tax system doesn't care whether you're up or down, whether you're actually up or down is entirely your own question to answer, and it is worth answering properly before you sell anything. A loss you can see clearly is still useful information for your own decision-making, just not for a tax deduction that isn't coming.
Open your Gains page in NetWort to see your realized and unrealized profit and loss across every crypto position before deciding what to sell. If you want the fuller picture on Indonesia's base crypto tax rate before you factor in a specific sale, Indonesia's crypto tax rate covers the mechanics in more depth. Check ETH's price history if you need the actual value on the day you're planning to sell.