How to Calculate Crypto Profit (and What Most People Get Wrong)

The short answer: crypto profit = (sale price × amount − sell fees) − (buy price × amount + buy fees), and percentage return is that profit divided by your total cost — leave out the two fee terms and you overstate the gain on every single round trip.

“How much did I make?” sounds like a one-step question, and the naive version is: sell price minus buy price. That answer is almost always slightly wrong, and occasionally wrong enough to matter — because it ignores the fees you paid, the size of the bet you took, and how long your money was tied up. Here’s the version that survives contact with your actual brokerage statement.

The core formula

Profit is proceeds minus cost basis, with fees folded into both:

Profit = (sale price × amount − sell fee) − (buy price × amount + buy fee)

• Cost basis is everything you spent to acquire the position: the purchase price plus the buy-side fee. The fee is part of what the asset cost you, so it belongs in the basis.
• Proceeds is everything you actually received on sale: the sale value minus the sell-side fee. The fee comes out before the money reaches you.

Get those two right and the profit is just their difference. Almost every wrong profit number in circulation comes from dropping one of the fee terms.

A worked example

You buy 0.5 BTC at $60,000 on an exchange charging 0.5% per trade, then sell it later at $68,000.

Step	Calculation	Amount
Buy value	0.5 × $60,000	$30,000.00
Buy fee	0.5% of $30,000	$150.00
Cost basis	$30,000 + $150	$30,150.00
Sale value	0.5 × $68,000	$34,000.00
Sell fee	0.5% of $34,000	$170.00
Proceeds	$34,000 − $170	$33,830.00
Profit	$33,830 − $30,150	$3,680.00

The naive “price went up $8,000 on half a coin, so $4,000” overstates the gain by $320 — the two fees plus their effect. On a round trip that’s about 1% of the position quietly missing from the naive number, and on a smaller move it’s exactly the amount that decides whether you were up or down at all.

Percentage return: the number that’s actually comparable

Dollars don’t compare across position sizes; percentages do.

Return % = profit ÷ cost basis × 100

The example above: $3,680 ÷ $30,150 = 12.2%. That figure is portable — it means the same thing on a $300 position and a $300,000 one, which raw profit never does. The denominator is your cost, not the current value; using current value understates every gain and is a common slip.

Realized vs. unrealized: the line that matters for tax

• Unrealized profit is the gain on a position you still hold. It’s real in the sense that you could sell into it — and unreal in the sense that it can evaporate before you do. It moves every second and, in most countries, it is not taxed.
• Realized profit is what you crystallize by selling (or swapping, or spending). That’s the number for your records, and it’s the one the tax authority cares about — see our cost-basis guide for how to pick which coins you sold when you’ve bought at several prices, and the tax calculator to estimate what’s owed on a realized gain.

Confusing the two is how people end up “up 40%” on a screen and surprised by a tax bill on the far smaller amount they actually sold.

Time turns equal profits unequal

Two trades both return 20%. One took three months, the other took three years. They are not the same investment: the three-month result annualizes to roughly 107% a year, the three-year result to about 6%. A profit figure with no time attached is only half a fact. When you’re comparing opportunities — or comparing your crypto to what the same money would have done elsewhere — the holding period is part of the calculation, not a footnote.

Let the tool carry the arithmetic

The formula is simple; doing it by hand for every trade, at the live price, with fees on both sides, is where errors creep in. Drop your buy price, sell price, amount and fee rate into the profit calculator — or a coin-specific version like the Bitcoin or Ethereum one, which pre-fills the real year-ago price — and it returns the dollar profit, the percentage return, and the fee drag in one shot — so the only thing left for you to decide is whether to actually sell. And for the question that comes before the trade — how big the position should have been in the first place — the position size calculator works that out from your account and stop-loss.