Position dated 5 September 2026. Status: In force. Instrument: Pravilnik o bližem načinu izvještavanja o korisnicima usluga povezanih sa kriptoimovinom, Official Gazette of Montenegro 118/2026, published 7 August 2026, in force 15 August 2026, made under Article 14h(9) of the tax procedure act as amended by Gazette 104/2026. The rulebook is drafted against Directive (EU) 2023/2226 and Regulation (EU) 2023/1114.
The date to write down is not the one in the gazette. Article 4(9) says the first information is filed for the relevant calendar year "from 1 January 2026". Filing happens once a year, in the year after the year the data concerns, so a Montenegrin exchange or custodian is already accumulating a reportable record for a year that began before the rulebook existed.
What gets reported about a user
For an individual: full name, date and place of birth, address, the state or states of residence, and tax identification numbers. For an entity, the same identifying set, plus the same details for every controlling person and the role that makes them one. The rulebook reads "controlling person" through the beneficial owner definition of Directive (EU) 2015/849.
Then the transaction picture, for each type of crypto-asset and for the whole year:
| Reported figure | Detail |
|---|---|
| Acquisitions against fiat | Gross amount paid, total units, number of transactions |
| Disposals against fiat | Gross amount received, total units, number of transactions |
| Crypto-for-crypto acquisitions and disposals | Total fair market value, units, number of transactions |
| Retail payment transactions | Total fair market value, units, number |
| Other transfers to the user | Fair market value, units and number, separated by type of transfer |
| Transfers out to unaffiliated addresses | Total fair market value and number of units sent to distributed-ledger addresses not known to be associated with a provider of virtual asset services or a financial institution |
That last line is the one to sit with. A withdrawal to a private wallet is not invisible to the regime: it is a named reporting category, reported by value and by units, precisely because the address is not known to belong to a regulated venue.
The due diligence, and what happens if you do not answer
Under Article 5 a provider obtains a residence self-certification when the relationship is established, and for users who were already on the books the deadline is 1 January 2027. Article 7 then supplies the enforcement: where a user does not provide the information on request, the provider prevents that user from carrying out reportable transactions. Records of the steps taken and the information relied on are kept for at least five and at most ten years.
Whether a provider is caught turns on Article 3(9). It applies to an entity authorised in an EU member state after the notification under Article 60 of the crypto-assets regulation, and also to a person without that authorisation who is tax resident in a member state, incorporated or organised under its law, managed from it, or has a fixed place of business there. A separate rule treats the customer on the other side of a merchant as the crypto-asset user in a retail payment transaction.
Where the information goes
Reporting is to the Montenegrin tax authority, which then exchanges automatically. The tax procedure act sets that clock separately: proceeds from the sale or acquisition of crypto-assets go out within nine months of the end of the calendar year reported on. There is one carve-out in Article 4(10): if the provider already reports the same user to a non-EU jurisdiction covered by a qualifying agreement with the member state where that user is resident, it does not report to Montenegro as well. If you are looking at licensing or compliance on the provider side, our fintech and crypto page sets out how we work through it, and our note on cross-border arrangement reporting covers the neighbouring duty published two days earlier.
What did not change
Nothing here taxes a crypto-asset. The rulebook is an information instrument: it sets who reports, about whom, in what fields, and how the figures are converted into a single currency at the moment of each transaction. The tax treatment of a gain, the residence rules that decide whose gain it is, and the anti-money-laundering identification duties all sit in their own statutes and are untouched. The rulebook also does not create a public register — the information moves between tax authorities.
How to verify
The gazette's register carries the rulebook with all fourteen pages: sluzbenilist.me/propisi/397029. Article 4 begins on page 8 and the reported fields run to page 10; paragraph 9, with the 1 January 2026 start, is on page 10. Article 5, on the same page, carries the 1 January 2027 deadline for existing individual users, and Article 7's enforcement points are on page 13.
The enabling article is in the amending law at 396192, whose Article 26 puts it in force the day after publication with no deferred application — the contrast with the corporate tax package in the same gazette is deliberate. We follow this file under Legal Updates.
