Afghanistan capital gains tax calculator

Afghanistan has no separate flat capital gains tax. A gain on a covered asset (shares of stock in a corporation or LLC, a trade or business, a factory, or business transport equipment) is taxable income assessed on the natural-person schedule of article 4(3) of the Income Tax Law 2009: 0% to AFN 60,000 a year, 2% to 150,000, 10% to 1,200,000 and 20% above. The 20% sometimes quoted is the top marginal rate of that scale (and the legal-entity rate), never a flat personal CGT.

A covered gain on an asset owned eighteen months or more is averaged: the gain is divided by the number of years owned, the average annual gains are added to your other taxable income, income tax is computed on that base per article 4, and the resulting effective rate, floored at 2 percent, applies to the whole base. The law joins the qualifying conditions with "one or more", so a plain market sale of a capital asset qualifies; there is no need for the transfer to be anything other than a sale.

Article 30(1): the price receivable from the sale or transfer of covered movable or immovable property by a natural person bears 1 percent tax at the time of transfer of ownership, in lieu of income tax. The base is the full price with no gain calculation, and covered means the article 23 property groups: a trade or business including goodwill, a factory with its equipment, machinery, buildings and land, and business transport equipment. The law nowhere extends the charge to shares or securities, so share sales do not pay it.

No. Article 28 lets a share loss offset only share gains of the same year; any excess is permanently non-deductible. Article 27 lets a loss on a business capital asset deduct from the same year's taxable income. No carryforward exists anywhere in the published law.

Tax-year representation: this record keys the Solar Hijri tax year 1405 (1 Hamal to the end of Hoot) to the Gregorian year it starts in, modelled as 2026-03-21 to the day before the next 21 March. Article 3(1): "The tax year is the solar (Hejiri Shamsi) year which starts on the first day of Hamal (21 March) and ends on the last day of Hoot (20 March) of that year." In the real calendar 1 Hamal occasionally falls on 20 or 22 March, so a sale dated on the wobble day may sit one day off the modelled boundary; the fixed 21 March is the registered approximation. Source: https://momp.gov.af/sites/default/files/2019-03/Income_Tax_Law.pdf

Mechanism: Afghanistan has no separate flat capital gains tax. Article 21: "The gain from the sale or exchange of capital assets or investment in trade or business shall be subject to income tax", and Article 23(1) makes gain from "the sale, exchange, or transfer" of four covered asset groups taxable income: "1. a trade or business, including goodwill; 2. a factory including equipment, machinery, buildings and land, or any part of such assets; 3. equipment used in the business of transporting persons and goods; and 4. shares of stock in corporations or limited liability companies." A natural person's covered gain is assessed as income on the article 4(3) schedule carried in the af-income-tax records (with the article 29 special method below), so the mechanism is marginal-income. The 20 percent that circulates in secondary summaries is at most the top marginal rate of that schedule (and the legal-person rate of article 4(1)), never a flat personal CGT rate. The Afghanistan Revenue Department's Dari notice on transfer of ownership tax reproduces article 23's four categories verbatim: https://ard.gov.af/1522/%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84%DB%8C%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%85%D9%84%DA%A9%DB%8C%D8%AA

Gain and deductions: Article 24: "Proceeds from sale, exchange and transfer of assets (except by inheritance), shall be reported in full" with deductions for "Cost to the taxpayer of the asset and investment sold, less the total amount allowable for its depreciation since it was acquired" and "Sale expenses including commission, advertising, documents and other expenses of transferring the asset." Article 25 puts the market value at the time of transfer "shall be the basis for computing the gain"; Article 26: "The form of transfer of movable or immovable assets (except by inheritance) shall not affect taxability of the gain." Article 23(2): "Gain from the sale or transfer of movable or immovable property acquired by inheritance shall be excluded" from article 23(1). No annual exemption, allowance or indexation for capital gains exists anywhere in the published law.

Special 18-month method (article 29, quoted in full from the law): "(1) Gain, taxable under Article 23 of this Law, from the sale or transfer of an asset owned by a person eighteen months or more shall be subject to the provisions of this Article if one or more of the following conditions are met: the transfer of property (except by inheritance) was not a sale; the asset transferred was a capital asset; the asset was transferred on sale or liquidation of a business. (2) The income tax of any person in any tax year where assets were transferred under any of the circumstances described in paragraph 1 of this Article will be the product of the person's taxable income from all sources multiplied by the special rate imposed by paragraph (3) of this Article. (3) The special rate imposed by this Article shall be determined as follows: the gain from transfer of any asset (except by inheritance) is divided by the number of years it was owned; the average annual gain or gains so determined are added to all other taxable income and income tax is computed according to the rate schedule in Article 4 of this Law; the tax so computed, divided by the amount of taxable income for which it was computed is the special rate. If the resulting rate is less than two percent, the applicable rate shall be two percent." Reading recorded by this build: the three conditions are joined by "one or more", so a plain market sale of a capital asset qualifies through the second bullet without needing the not-a-sale bullet; shares of stock are capital assets, so a share held eighteen months or more sold on the market uses the special method. The edge is "eighteen months or more", inclusive. The law does not state an anniversary-versus-day-count convention; the engine uses calendar-month anniversaries and whole years owned, recorded as a convention, not a statutory answer.

1 percent in-lieu transfer tax (article 30, quoted): "(1) According to the provisions of Article 23 of this Law, the price receivable from the sale or transfer of movable or immovable property by a natural person shall be subject to one percent tax at the time of transfer of ownership of the property in lieu of income tax. (2) ... by a legal person ... shall be subject to one percent tax ... The tax paid will be allowed as a credit against tax payable when the tax return is filed." The base is the price receivable (the sale price), not the net gain, and it is charged at transfer of ownership (article 88(7): "Persons who own moveable and immovable property shall pay tax due at the time of transfer of ownership of such property."). Modelled for natural persons on the covered article 23 movable or immovable property card (trade or business, factory, business transport equipment) in place of the income-tax computation; for legal persons it is a credit, which this natural-person calculator does not compute. The law nowhere extends this 1 percent to transfers of shares or securities: no provision mentions securities, and no securities 1 percent is modelled. The old project manifest's "1% securities variant" is unsupported by the statute and was left out.

Losses: Article 27: "Losses from the sale or exchange of capital assets used in trade or business shall be deductible from the taxable income of the taxpayer in the tax year in which the sale or exchange took place, provided that a gain from such sale or exchange would have been taxable." Article 28: "Loss from sale or exchange of shares of stock shall not be deductible except from the gain from sale or exchange of shares of stock in the same year. For any such gain, if in excess of loss from such transactions, the excess is taxable, but if any such loss is in excess of gain, the excess loss shall not be deductible." Share losses therefore net only same-year share gains and any excess is permanently non-deductible; the published law provides no carryforward for any capital loss, so this calculator offers none.

Out of scope: ordinary private assets outside article 23 (a personal home that is not business property, jewellery, art, collectibles) attract no located capital-gain charge in the published law, and crypto-assets, funds and ETFs are unclassified in the 2009 law and in the 2026 official materials reviewed; this calculator computes nothing for them and flags them instead of inventing a rule.

The Ministry PDFs are official Ministry-hosted files, but their English translations are expressly marked unofficial (the income tax law cover: "An unofficial translation of the Income Tax Law 2009 as published in Official Gazette number 976"); the Dari/Pashtu Official Gazette text controls where wording conflicts.