Capital Gains Tax on Shares in the UK: What You Pay and How You Report It (2026/27)

If you sell shares outside an ISA or a pension and make a profit, you pay capital gains tax (CGT) at 18% or 24% on anything above your £3,000 annual exempt amount for 2026/27. Those are the same two rates that apply when you sell a rental property, because the rates for shares and other assets were brought into line with residential property rates on 30 October 2024. If you have been assuming that capital gains from shares are taxed more gently than gains on property, that stopped being true.

What has not been brought into line is the reporting. A gain on shares goes on your Self Assessment return and the tax is due by the 31 January that follows the tax year. A gain on residential property has its own return and its own 60-day clock. Investors who hold both regularly apply the property deadline to a share sale, or the share deadline to a property sale, and one of those two mistakes carries penalties. So: what you pay, when you pay it, how the share matching rules decide your cost, and the handful of points where owning property alongside shares changes the answer.

Do you pay capital gains tax on shares?

Yes, unless the shares are sheltered or your gains are small enough to sit inside your allowance.

Capital gains tax applies when you dispose of shares held in an ordinary dealing account. Disposal means more than selling for cash: giving shares away, swapping them, or transferring them to anyone other than a spouse or civil partner all count. You are taxed on the gain rather than the proceeds, so what matters is the difference between the sale value and what the holding cost you, after deducting your dealing charges and the stamp duty you paid when you bought.

Stocks and shares mean the same thing here, so capital gains tax on UK stocks works in exactly the same way. The charge is not limited to British companies either: if you are UK resident, shares in an overseas company held through a UK dealing account are chargeable too.

Shares inside a stocks and shares ISA are exempt. Shares inside a pension are exempt. Gains covered by your £3,000 annual exempt amount are not taxed at all. Everything else is chargeable, including funds, investment trusts and exchange traded funds bought through a dealing account, though gilts and most qualifying corporate bonds sit outside the charge.

How much capital gains tax on shares do you pay in 2026/27?

18% or 24%, depending on your income. Here is the order of operations.

1. Add up your gains for the tax year across everything you have sold.
2. Deduct any capital losses for the year, then any losses carried forward from earlier years.
3. Deduct your annual exempt amount of £3,000.
4. Stack what is left on top of your taxable income. The slice that still fits inside your unused basic-rate band is taxed at 18%. Everything above it is taxed at 24%.

Say you sold a holding for £34,000 that had cost you £16,000, and you paid £200 in dealing costs across the two transactions. Your gain is £17,800. You have no losses. Deduct the £3,000 allowance and £14,800 is taxable. If your income already puts you in the higher-rate band, the whole £14,800 is taxed at 24%, which is £3,552. If you had £8,000 of unused basic-rate band, the first £8,000 is taxed at 18%, which is £1,440, and the remaining £6,800 at 24%, which is £1,632, giving £3,072. The band is worth £480 to you, being 6% of £8,000.

The step people miss is the third and fourth together. The allowance is applied before the stacking, and the stacking uses your income for the whole year, not your income at the moment you sold. A large bonus in March can change the rate on a gain you made in June.

Work out your own number. Our UK capital gains tax calculator now has a shares mode. Choose "Shares & other assets", enter your sale value, your cost and your income, and it applies the 18% and 24% split and the £3,000 allowance for you. It is the fastest way to sanity-check a figure before you commit to a sale, and it works for property gains on the same page if you want to compare the two.

How does the £3,000 allowance work if you hold property and shares?

You get one annual exempt amount of £3,000 for the whole tax year, not one per asset class. It covers your gains on shares, your gains on rental property, and your gains on anything else chargeable, all in the same pot. Whichever disposal you make first uses it up.

This matters more than it used to. The allowance was £12,300 before April 2023 and £6,000 for 2023/24, and at those levels a modest share gain often disappeared inside it. At £3,000 it rarely does. A single buy-to-let sale will normally exhaust the whole allowance on its own, which means a share sale later in the same tax year is taxable from the first pound of gain.

Three practical consequences if you own both:

• Sequence your disposals across tax years. If you plan to sell a rental property and rebalance a share portfolio, putting them in different tax years gives you two allowances rather than one. The tax year ends on 5 April, and the date that counts for shares is the date of the trade.
• Use both allowances in a married couple or civil partnership. Each of you has £3,000, and a transfer between you is free of tax. Shares held in one name can be moved into joint names before a sale so that both allowances are in play. This route is not open to unmarried partners, for whom the transfer is itself a disposal at market value.
• The allowance does not carry forward. If you have gains you could crystallise and an unused allowance in March, it disappears on 6 April.

The allowance is covered in more depth, including the trust position and the interaction with Private Residence Relief, in our guide to the £3,000 CGT annual exempt amount for 2026/27.

Shares versus property: how the two capital gains taxes compare

The rates are identical. Almost everything else is different. If you hold both, this is the table to keep.

Point of comparison	Shares and other assets	UK residential property
Rate inside the basic-rate band	18%	18%
Rate above the basic-rate band	24%	24%
Rates aligned from	30 October 2024	30 October 2024
Trustees and personal representatives	24%	24%
Annual exempt amount	£3,000 in total, shared across both
How you report	Self Assessment, or HMRC's real-time CGT service	A separate CGT on UK property return, where tax is due
When you pay	31 January after the tax year ends	Within 60 days of completion
Identifying what you sold	Matching rules: same day, then 30 days, then the pool	No matching rules, each property is its own asset
Tax-free wrapper available	Yes, ISA and pension	No
Part disposals	Routine, you can sell any number of shares	Rare and awkward, usually all or nothing
Main residence relief	Not available	Available where it was your home
Transfers between spouses	No gain, no loss	No gain, no loss
Losses	Interchangeable, a share loss can cover a property gain

The reporting row is where the penalties live: filing a share gain on the 60-day property service is the wrong return, and treating a property gain as something you can leave until January is a late filing. The matching rules row is where the arithmetic lives, and it has no property equivalent at all.

The property side of this comparison is set out in full in our complete guide to capital gains tax on UK property.

When do you pay capital gains tax on shares, and how do you report it?

By 31 January following the end of the tax year, through Self Assessment.

Sell shares on 1 May 2026 and the disposal falls in the 2026/27 tax year, which ends on 5 April 2027. You report it on the capital gains pages of your 2026/27 return and pay by 31 January 2028. That is a long runway compared with property, and it is easy to forget about a sale you made twenty months earlier, so keep the contract note when you get it rather than hunting for it later.

If you would rather clear the liability early, HMRC's real-time capital gains tax service lets you report a disposal and pay soon after it happens without waiting for the return. It is useful if you do not otherwise file Self Assessment, or if you simply prefer not to carry the liability.

What you do not do is use the 60-day property return. That service exists for disposals of UK land and buildings. A share sale does not go on it, even if you sold the shares specifically to fund a property purchase, and even if the shares were in a property company. The only place shares meet that 60-day service is the narrow non-resident rule for indirect disposals of shares in property-rich entities, which is a specialist position rather than an ordinary portfolio one.

Keep the contract note: acquisition date, number of shares, price paid, dealing costs and the stamp duty you paid on purchase. You need all five for the pooling calculation below.

How do the share matching rules decide what your shares cost?

When you sell 500 shares out of a holding you built up over several years, you cannot choose which 500 you sold. The share matching rules decide for you, in a fixed order:

1. Same day. Shares of the same class in the same company bought on the same day as the sale are matched first.
2. The next 30 days. Shares bought in the 30 days after the sale are matched next. This is the rule that stops you selling to crystallise a loss and buying straight back in.
3. The pool. Everything else is matched against the section 104 pool, which is all your remaining shares of that class treated as a single asset with a single average cost.

A worked example. You buy 1,000 shares in January 2019 at £4 each, costing £4,000. You buy another 500 in June 2023 at £10 each, costing £5,000. Your pool now holds 1,500 shares at a total cost of £9,000, which is an average of £6 a share.

In May 2026 you sell 600 shares at £12 each, raising £7,200. You bought nothing on the day of sale and nothing in the following 30 days, so the whole disposal comes out of the pool. The cost of the 600 shares is 600 multiplied by £6, which is £3,600, and your gain is £3,600. Deduct the £3,000 allowance, assuming you have not used it elsewhere, and £600 is taxable. At 24% that is £144.

Your pool afterwards holds 900 shares at a cost of £5,400, still £6 a share. The average is what carries forward, not the price of any particular purchase.

Now change one fact. Ten days after the sale you buy 400 shares back at £11.50. The 30-day rule now matches 400 of the 600 you sold against that repurchase rather than against the pool, so the cost attributed to those 400 is £4,600 rather than £2,400, and the gain on that slice collapses. That is the rule doing its job. Our page on bed-and-breakfasting and the 30-day rule works through the mechanics and the legitimate alternatives in detail, including why the rule does not apply to property at all.

The statutory framework sits at sections 104, 105 and 106A of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992. You will not need to read it, but you will need to apply it, and a holding that has been through a rights issue, a bonus issue, a share split or a takeover needs the pool rebuilt at each of those events before the sale calculation is reliable.

Do you pay capital gains tax on a stocks and shares ISA?

No. Gains inside a stocks and shares ISA are completely outside capital gains tax, and you have nothing to report.

Nothing else in the UK system removes a gain this cleanly, so it is worth being deliberate about. If you hold the same company both inside and outside an ISA, selling the ISA holding first raises cash with no tax charge and leaves the taxable holding intact. Moving existing holdings into an ISA is a disposal in itself, so a "bed and ISA" transaction crystallises a gain on the way through, but doing it while the gain is still inside your £3,000 allowance costs nothing and shelters everything that comes afterwards.

Pensions work the same way for capital gains purposes. A SIPP pays no capital gains tax on the investments it holds, and the tax comes later as income tax when you draw the money. The choice between the two is about access and income tax treatment rather than about the capital gains position, which is identical.

One point that catches property investors specifically: there is no property equivalent. You cannot wrap a buy-to-let in an ISA. If you are choosing between adding to a portfolio and adding to a share account, the ISA exemption is a genuine structural advantage on the shares side that no amount of property planning replicates.

What happens when you sell shares to fund a property deposit?

The sale is taxed on its own terms, and what you buy with the proceeds is irrelevant. There is no rollover relief that lets an investor move a gain from shares into residential property, and buying a rental within days of the sale changes nothing.

So plan the sale rather than the purchase. Suppose you need £60,000 for a deposit and you hold shares standing at a £22,000 gain. Sell the lot in one go as a higher-rate taxpayer and you have £19,000 taxable after the allowance, giving £4,560 at 24%, so you actually need to sell more than £60,000 of shares to end up with £60,000 after tax. Split the sale across 5 April and use two years' allowances and you save £720 of tax. Transfer half to a spouse who has an unused allowance and unused basic-rate band first, and the saving is larger again.

The trap is the year in which you also sell a property. If you sold a rental in the same tax year, its gain has already used the £3,000, and the share sale is taxable from the first pound. Investors recycling capital from one asset class into another often do both in the same twelve months without noticing they only had one allowance between them.

Can you cut the rate on a share sale?

A spouse transfer. This is the everyday route, and the only one of the three below that an ordinary portfolio investor can use. Transfers between spouses and civil partners who live together happen at no gain and no loss under section 58 of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992, so your spouse takes over your original cost and no tax arises on the transfer. When they sell, they use their own £3,000 and their own bands. Where one of you is a basic-rate taxpayer with room in the band, moving half the holding across before the sale can take part of the gain from 24% down to 18% as well as adding a second allowance. It has to be a genuine outright gift, and it has to happen before the sale.

Business Asset Disposal Relief. BADR gives 18% from 6 April 2026 on qualifying disposals, up to a £1 million lifetime limit. On shares it is narrow: you need at least 5% of the ordinary share capital, at least 5% of the profits available for distribution and at least 5% of the assets on a winding up, held throughout the two years before the disposal, in a company that is genuinely trading. A listed portfolio holding will not come close, and a company whose business is holding investment property is not a trading company. It is a relief for people selling a stake in their own business, and at 18% against a headline 24% the advantage has narrowed to six percentage points. The qualification rules, including why property companies fail, are set out in our guide to Business Asset Disposal Relief and residential property.

Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) deferral. Subscribing for qualifying EIS shares can defer a gain, and the relief applies to a gain on any chargeable asset, including a gain you made on shares or on a rental property. Be clear about what it does: it postpones the tax rather than removing it, and the deferred gain comes back into charge when you sell the EIS shares. The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) is often named alongside it but works differently, giving a partial exemption on a gain reinvested in qualifying SEIS shares rather than a postponement, subject to its own conditions. Either way you are taking on the risk of an early-stage unquoted company, which is a real investment decision rather than a tax administration one. Our guide to CGT deferral for property investors covers the mechanics and the trade-offs, and the same analysis applies to a share gain.

What about shares you have held for 20 years?

Time does not reduce a capital gain in the UK. There is no taper, no indexation for individuals and no discount for a long hold, so a holding bought in 2006 and sold in 2026 is taxed on the full twenty years of growth at 18% or 24%. The only relief that time provides is the chance to spread disposals across several tax years and use several allowances.

What long holdings create instead is a records problem, and no capital gains tax calculator can solve it for you until the base cost is settled. You need the original purchase price, then every event that changed the pool since: rights issues where you paid for extra shares, bonus issues and splits where you did not, scrip dividends taken as shares rather than cash, and takeovers where a holding in one company became a holding in another. Each one adjusts the pooled cost. Once you have that figure, the tax arithmetic itself is quick.

Where the shares came to you rather than being bought, the base cost is different again. Inherited shares are taken at their market value on the date of death, so pre-death growth is never taxed. Shares gifted to you by anyone other than a spouse are taken at market value on the date of the gift.

Does moving abroad remove the charge?

Not reliably, and the rule that catches people is the five-year one. If you leave the UK, sell shares while non-resident and return within five years, section 10A of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992 treats gains on assets you owned when you left as arising in the year you come back. Being outside the UK on the day of the trade does not settle it.

Shares are the asset class where this bites hardest, because UK land is caught by a separate non-resident charge whether you return or not. If time abroad is part of your thinking, settle the residence position before the disposal rather than after it.

What matters most if you hold shares and property?

If you hold a portfolio alongside rental property, the planning question is almost never what the rate is, because CGT on shares and CGT on residential property have run at the same 18% and 24% since 30 October 2024. It is which disposal happens in which tax year, whose name each asset is in before the sale, and which of the two reporting regimes each disposal falls into. Get those three right and the rate looks after itself.