Are staking rewards taxable in the UK?

Yes. For most people HMRC treats the sterling value of tokens at the moment of receipt as miscellaneous income, taxable at your marginal rate, per its Cryptoassets Manual guidance on staking.

Do I pay tax again when I sell staking rewards?

On the growth, yes. The value taxed as income becomes your acquisition cost, and a later disposal is a capital gain or loss measured against that cost, so the same pounds are never taxed twice.

What records do I need for staking?

Date, amount and sterling value of every reward at receipt. Without them your income figure and every later gain computed from those tokens are both wrong.

Staking rewards are taxed twice in the UK, at three separate moments

Staking looks like one event, tokens appear, and is actually three tax moments spread across time. People who get staking tax wrong almost always collapse the three into one. Here they are, in order, each with its rule.

Moment one, receipt, income tax

For an individual whose staking does not amount to a financial trade, which is most people, HMRC’s guidance at CRYPTO21200 is direct, “the pound sterling value (at the time of receipt) of any tokens awarded will be taxable as income”, treated as miscellaneous income, with allowable expenses able to reduce the figure. Marginal rate, so 20%, 40% or 45% territory, and reportable even in a year where you sold nothing. Whether an intensive setup crosses into being a trade depends on degree of activity, organisation, risk and commerciality, and if you think that might be you, that is a professional conversation, the manual applies circumstances, not a blanket rule.

Moment two, the same second, your cost basis is born

The sterling value just taxed as income becomes the acquisition cost of those tokens for capital gains purposes, feeding your section 104 pool like any purchase. This is the moment people lose, because nothing feels like it happened, no money moved, no exchange pinged. But skip recording it and two numbers corrupt at once, this year’s income understated, and every future disposal overstated because the tokens look like they cost nothing.

Moment three, disposal, capital gains

Sell, swap or spend the rewards later and the ordinary matching rules apply against that recorded cost. Worked example, the same one from the full guide. You receive 100 tokens when they trade at £3, so £300 of income now. Two years on you sell them for £750. The gain is £750 minus the £300 already-taxed basis, £450, taxed under the current CGT rates. Nothing double-taxed, provided moment two was written down.

The practical failure mode, and the fix

Weekly rewards across a few validators produce hundreds of tiny receipts a year, each needing a date, an amount and a sterling value at that instant. Nobody does that by hand past week three. TaxHash ingests your history, values rewards at receipt, keeps the income ledger and the gains ledger separate, and writes both into the report suite, income report for moment one, capital gains report with the rule named per disposal for moment three, all computed on your machine, free below 1,000 transactions.

General information, not advice, and the trade-versus-investment boundary genuinely moves cases, when in doubt, ask a vetted human.