Declaring Foreign Crypto Accounts on Formulaire 3916-bis

Most French crypto content is about the flat tax and Formulaire 2086. Formulaire 3916-bis is a different obligation entirely, it is owed by many more people, and it is the one that produces penalties in years when no tax at all was due.

What it is

Formulaire 3916-bis is the declaration of digital asset accounts opened, held, used or closed abroad, filed alongside your annual income tax return. It is a reporting obligation, not a tax computation.

The essential point is independence. It is separate from your gains, and it is separate from Formulaire 2086. You can have made no disposal, owe nothing, and still be required to file it. Filing 2086 does not discharge it, and having nothing to declare on 2086 does not excuse it.

Who has to file it

The trigger is holding a digital asset account with a provider established abroad, as a French resident. That means the obligation catches a large proportion of ordinary French crypto users, because most major exchanges are not established in France.

Note the wording of the underlying obligation: accounts opened, held, used or closed during the year. An account you closed in March is still an account you held during the year, which is the detail people most often miss when they think in terms of current balances.

What is and is not an account

The distinction that matters is custody. An account with a provider that holds your assets is a digital asset account. A self custody wallet, where you hold your own keys and no provider is involved, is a different situation: there is no account with anyone.

Because the boundary can be fuzzy for hybrid products and for platforms whose legal establishment is not obvious from the interface, confirm your specific case with the DGFiP or a conseiller fiscal rather than reasoning by analogy from a forum post.

One per account

The declaration is made per account, not once for all of them. Someone who has used five exchanges over the years is dealing with five declarations, not one, and the penalty exposure scales with the number of accounts rather than with the amounts in them.

That per account structure is what makes this obligation disproportionately expensive relative to the tax it accompanies, and it is why the obligation is worth taking seriously even for accounts holding trivial balances.

The penalty is why this article exists

Failure to declare a foreign account carries a fixed penalty per undeclared account, applied irrespective of whether tax was due. A user with several dormant exchange accounts can face a total that far exceeds any tax on their actual gains. Confirm the current amount and the applicable periods with the DGFiP, since penalty provisions are set by law and change.

What to do

1. List every provider account you have ever used, including closed ones and ones with no balance. Current balance is not the test.
2. Establish which are established abroad. Where a platform is legally established is not always where its website suggests.
3. Prepare one declaration per account, with the identifying details of each.
4. File alongside your income tax return, in the same campaign.
5. Keep the list. The obligation recurs annually, and it is easier to maintain than to reconstruct.

And the gains are still separate

Remember that for private investors a taxable event only arises on conversion to fiat, spending crypto, or receiving crypto as income. Crypto to crypto exchanges are not taxable. Those disposals go on Formulaire 2086 and then Formulaire 2042 C, taxed under the flat tax at 30% on 2025 gains, with 2026 rising to approximately 31.4%, so verify for your year. None of that changes the 3916-bis obligation.

Our Formulaire 2086 guide covers the gains side, and French crypto tax covers the framework.

General information, not tax advice. Rules change and depend on your circumstances. Confirm the current position with the relevant tax authority or a qualified tax professional.