Zero capital gains on Bitcoin, by sovereign design.
El Salvador did not bolt a tax holiday onto a passport. It rebuilt its tax code around Bitcoin at the sovereign level, retained 0% foreign-investor capital gains even after repealing legal tender, and never joined the CRS reporting network. Here is the structure, stated plainly, with the residency caveat the brochures leave off.
Four zeros, written into the code.
El Salvador’s Bitcoin tax structure is short by design. Four lines where most countries levy their heaviest charges, plus a single consumption tax that funds the state. Every figure below survived the 30 April 2025 legal-tender repeal intact.
El Salvador has been dollarized since 2001, so there is no FX risk on holdings or settlement; the currency is the US dollar. The country is not a participating jurisdiction in the OECD Common Reporting Standard, a true and material feature covered in full on the Non-CRS page. General information, not tax advice.
What the zero is actually worth.
A figure on a ledger is abstract until you put a stack behind it. Here is what 0% Bitcoin capital gains means in dollars, at two scales, against the United States rate a foreign investor would otherwise face.
A US-based Bitcoiner selling 10 BTC at $75K with a $23K cost basis realizes roughly $520K in taxable gains, about $124K+ in federal tax at the top rate (including NIIT), before state tax. With El Salvador’s 0% Bitcoin capital gains, that $124K stays in the stack. For 100 BTC at the same basis: roughly $5.2M gains, about $1.2M federal liability. At that scale, the zero-capital-gains structure is the core reason the Freedom Passport exists.
Estimates only; outcomes depend on residency and source-country obligations including US worldwide taxation. Consult a qualified cross-border tax advisor. For where the $1,000,000 contribution itself sits in the picture, see the passport cost page and the pricing detail.
Treaty-level protection, not goodwill.
A low rate is only as durable as the law behind it. El Salvador’s investor position is anchored in standing treaties: one full Double Tax Agreement and six Bilateral Investment Treaties, layered with the CA-4 zone.
One full DTA with Spain
El Salvador holds a full Double Tax Agreement with Spain that blocks double taxation on investment income. The same gain cannot be taxed in both jurisdictions; the treaty allocates the right to tax and is enforceable as law.
Six BITs, investor-side
Six Bilateral Investment Treaties, with the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Panama, and Uruguay, extend investor protection against nationalization, expropriation, and discriminatory tax treatment. Protection that survives a change of government.
Layered with free movement
The DTA and BITs are layered with CA-4, the free-movement zone covering El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Tax certainty and regional mobility sit on the same legal footing.
Treaty-level protection means a rule a future administration cannot quietly reverse against an investor without breaching a standing international agreement. It is the difference between a low rate and a defended one. The fuller institutional picture sits on the Freedom Passport program page.
The passport is not the tax cut.
You are taxed where you are tax-resident, not where your passport is from.
Here is the part most pages skip, and it is the single most important thing on this one. Citizenship and tax residency are separate. El Salvador’s zero-rate structure is its domestic law, and domestic law reaches you only once you become a Salvadoran tax resident, which requires physical presence plus genuine economic ties to the country, not the document alone. Holding the Freedom Passport while you live and work somewhere else does not move your tax residence, does not switch off your home country’s rules, and does not lower your home-country bill by a dollar.
For US citizens the point is sharper still. The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live or what other passports they hold; US persons remain subject to worldwide income reporting and FATCA, and no second citizenship changes that. The only way a US person ends US worldwide taxation is formal renunciation, an irreversible step with its own exit-tax regime, handled through our sister service exit.ly. A second citizenship is usually the prerequisite to renunciation, but the passport alone changes nothing about US tax, and we will not tell you otherwise. Home-country obligations always apply; the honest version of that is on the Non-CRS page.
As Adam Juchniewicz, CEO of 21 CBI, puts it: "El Salvador's zero is real and it is written into law, but it is the citizenship we deliver, not the tax cut; the tax cut follows from where you become resident, and that is the part we map with you before anything moves."
Zero by design, defended by treaty.
If a zero-Bitcoin-capital-gains life is the goal, the Freedom Passport is the legal right that makes it possible and relocation is the rest. Book a confidential file-read to map your specific situation, source country and all, before anything moves.