National Assembly Budget Office launches study into digital-asset taxation issues…rules to be refined ahead of 2027 rollout

The National Assembly Budget Office (NABO) has launched a study to review system-wide issues ahead of the planned implementation of income taxation on digital assets on Jan. 1, 2027.

According to the Public Procurement Service’s Nara Marketplace on the 23rd, NABO posted a tender for a service contract titled “Study on Taxation Issues and Improvement Measures for Virtual Assets.” The contract period is four months, with a budget of KRW 30 million.

Under the current tax proposal, income generated from the transfer or lending of digital assets is classified as “other income” and taxed at 20% (22% including local income tax). After an annual basic deduction of KRW 2.5 million, taxpayers are required to report it as part of their comprehensive income tax filing in May of the following year. For non-residents, withholding tax is applied at the lower of 10% of the transfer value or 20% of the capital gain. The regime, however, has been postponed multiple times, citing inadequate infrastructure.

NABO noted that uncertainty persists in the current tax framework. It said the legal nature and tax standards for new asset types such as NFTs, stablecoins and tokenized securities (STOs) are not clearly defined, and that the timing of taxation and valuation methods for income arising from mining, staking, lending, airdrops and hard forks also need to be established. In particular, it flagged as key review items whether to use the time of reward receipt or the time of sale as the tax point, and whether repetitive activities should be treated as business income.

The study will also cover changes in the global environment, including the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), institutionalization of stablecoins in the United States, and discussions in Japan on overhauling taxation methods. NABO plans to provide policy recommendations by conducting a comprehensive analysis of digital-asset taxation issues ahead of the 2027 implementation.