Schedule VDA is the part of the income-tax return where every crypto transfer of the year is listed. Not the total: every transfer. Most notices about crypto start here, because the department already has the exchange side of each row and compares it with what you file.
What goes in and what stays out
A row is needed for every transfer of a virtual digital asset in the tax year (1 April to 31 March): a sale for rupees, a swap of one coin for another, a stablecoin conversion, a payment made in crypto, and a gift given. A deposit of coins into your own wallet is not a transfer. Buying with rupees is not a transfer either; it only sets the cost for a later row.
Rewards, airdrops, staking and interest do not go in Schedule VDA when you receive them. They are income from other sources, valued on the day they arrived. They come back to Schedule VDA only when you later sell them, with that value as the cost.
The columns, in plain words
- Date of acquisition. The day you bought the units you are now selling. Under FIFO, the oldest units go first, platform by platform.
- Date of transfer. The day of the sale, swap or payment, in Indian time. Exchange exports are often in UTC; a trade at 2 a.m. UTC on 1 April belongs to the new year in India.
- Cost of acquisition. What you paid for those units in rupees, including the exchange fee on the buy. No indexation, no other expenses.
- Consideration received. The rupee value you got. For a swap, that is the rupee value of the coin you received on that day.
- Income from transfer. Consideration minus cost. If negative, it is a loss that counts for nothing: it cannot be set off against another row, another head, or next year.
The schedule is split by quarter because the 30% tax is due as advance tax during the year. Missing instalments cost interest, and the quarterly split is what the system uses to compute it.
The checks that save a notice
- Sum of consideration vs AIS. Add up the consideration column and compare it with the sale value reported by the exchanges in your Annual Information Statement. The exchange figure is gross and in rupees; yours must be as well. A gap of a few hundred rupees from rounding is fine. A gap of lakhs means a missing exchange, a swap you did not value, or a year-boundary trade on the wrong side.
- 1% TDS vs the rows. Every Indian-exchange sale had 1% deducted. The TDS schedule in your return should carry the same base amount as the rows it belongs to.
- Closing holdings. What is left after all the rows must match what each exchange and wallet showed on 31 March. If it does not, a row is missing or a cost is wrong.
Three mistakes we see every year
One line for the whole year. Entering a single row with the net profit is wrong and easy to detect, because AIS has the per-transaction picture. Netting losses. A loss on one coin cannot reduce the gain on another; each row stands alone. Ignoring swaps. BTC to ETH is a sale of BTC at that day's rupee value, even if no rupee ever moved.
If you want this done from your exports rather than by hand, the Crypto Tax Pack produces the Schedule VDA rows, the TDS and holdings checks and a one-page summary for your CA. The first six months are free.
Section references for tax year 2026-27 follow the Income-tax Act 2025: the 30% rate in the section 194 table (old section 115BBH) and the definition of a virtual digital asset in section 2(111) (old 2(47A)). This article is general information, not tax advice; your CA signs the return.