Freetrade Capital Gains Tax UK — GIA Trades, ISA Exemptions, and How to Report

Freetrade makes investing dead easy. Filing your taxes afterwards? Not so much. Freetrade doesn’t produce a CGT report for you — that’s on you. Here’s how to get it done without pulling your hair out.

The ISA question — check this first

Before you spend a single minute calculating anything, check which account your trades are in.

If all your trading has been inside a Freetrade Stocks and Shares ISA (the one you pay £5.99/month for on the Standard plan, or that’s included with Plus), you owe absolutely nothing. ISA gains are exempt from Capital Gains Tax. Full stop. No reporting needed. You can close this tab and get on with your weekend.

If you’ve been trading in your General Investment Account (GIA) — the free account that everyone starts with — then yes, you potentially owe CGT on any profits from selling.

Lots of Freetrade users started with the free GIA and later upgraded to the ISA. If that’s you, your GIA trades still count. The ISA exemption only applies from the point you moved money into the ISA wrapper.

Exporting your trade history

In the Freetrade app: go to Settings → Activity → Request a statement. You can also request it via the website under Account → Documents.

Freetrade provides a CSV export of your order history. The key columns are:

The good news: Freetrade gives you amounts in GBP. Even for US stocks, the conversion has already happened at execution time. You don’t need to mess about with HMRC exchange rates for most trades.

The bad news: the CSV format isn’t standardised and has changed over the years. Column names and ordering may differ depending on when you exported. Most CGT calculators have adapted to handle this.

What Freetrade charges (and what counts as allowable costs)

Freetrade’s commission-free model means there’s no per-trade fee. But there are still costs that affect your CGT calculation:

Stamp duty (0.5%): Applied on purchases of UK-listed shares. This is included in Freetrade’s total amount figure. It’s an allowable cost that increases your cost basis.

FX fee (0.99% on Basic, 0.59% on Standard/Plus): Applied when buying or selling non-GBP stocks. This is baked into the execution price — you won’t see it as a separate line item. It’s technically an incidental cost of acquisition or disposal.

No Stamp Duty on foreign shares: US stocks, Irish-domiciled ETFs, and other non-UK securities don’t attract the 0.5% stamp duty.

Fractional shares

Freetrade was one of the first UK platforms to offer fractional shares. From a CGT perspective, fractions work exactly like whole shares — they go into the Section 104 pool at their cost per share. If you bought 0.73 shares of Amazon at £125.40 each, your pool entry is 0.73 shares at £125.40.

The only wrinkle is rounding. When the pool’s average cost has many decimal places and you sell a fractional quantity, the cost allocation can produce tiny rounding differences. This is normal and HMRC isn’t going to query a discrepancy of pennies.

The auto-invest / recurring order trap

If you set up recurring investments (say, £100/month into a Vanguard ETF), each monthly purchase is a separate acquisition that enters your Section 104 pool. After a year, you’ve got 12 separate cost entries averaging into your pool.

This is actually quite tax-efficient. Your cost basis gradually averages out, reducing the impact of short-term price swings. But it does mean you have 12 transactions to account for rather than one lump sum — another reason to use a calculator rather than a spreadsheet.

Common Freetrade CGT mistakes

Including ISA trades. The most frequent error. If your CSV export includes ISA transactions, filter them out before calculating. TaxBull does this automatically — it detects Freetrade’s account column and excludes ISA rows.

Forgetting the FX fee exists. Because it’s invisible (baked into the price), people assume there are no fees. On a £5,000 US stock purchase at the basic tier, that’s £49.50 in fees — a legitimate allowable cost that reduces your gain.

Not exporting far enough back. If you bought shares in 2022 and sold them in 2025, you need the 2022 buy transaction to establish your cost basis. Always export your entire Freetrade history, not just the current tax year.

Calculating and reporting

Once you have your GIA-only CSV, the process is the same as any broker: apply same-day matching, 30-day bed & breakfast rule, then Section 104 pool. Report on SA108 Boxes 23-30 for listed shares.

Upload your Freetrade CSV to TaxBull — it auto-detects the Freetrade format, strips out ISA trades, and calculates your CGT with full audit trail. You can combine it with CSVs from other brokers if you trade on multiple platforms.

This guide is for informational purposes only. Verify all figures with a qualified tax professional before filing your self-assessment.