Sort the Income First: The Legal Order of Operations for Cutting Investment Tax

There are not many legal levers, and every one of them is named outright in the Tax Code: the long-term ownership relief, the deductions attached to an individual investment account, the netting and carry-forward of losses, narrow exemptions for particular securities, and the credit for tax already withheld abroad. Everything else that usually travels under the name "optimisation" is either a deferral of the payment date or a scheme. The order of operations never changes: first break the income down by type, because the type of income decides which relief can apply to it at all; then apply the relief; then check that the broker actually accounted for it, and claim separately whatever the broker had no way of knowing.

The broker calculates the tax, but you answer for it

A Russian broker is a withholding agent. It determines the tax base itself, withholds personal income tax when money leaves the account and again at the close of the calendar year, and applies some of the reliefs on its own initiative. That is convenient, and it creates the false impression that nothing is required of the investor.

Something is required. The agent sees only what passed through the agent. It does not know about a loss you booked at another broker, about the holding period of securities transferred in from outside without supporting documents, or about tax already withheld by a foreign depository. If the account does not hold enough free cash at year-end, the agent will not withhold the tax at all — it will report the shortfall to the inspectorate, and you will pay it yourself, against a notice. So the first practical skill here is reading the broker's report and reconciling it with your own picture of your trades. Issuer disclosures and corporate events are easiest to keep within reach in the reporting section and the events calendar: a great many tax consequences arise out of corporate actions rather than out of anything you did.

Step one: break the income down by type

This is not a formality. It is the fork in the road that everything else depends on.

Income from selling securities is the difference between the sale price and the costs of acquisition, commissions included. This is the income to which both the long-term ownership relief and the netting of losses can be applied.

Bond coupons have been taxed since 2021 with no carve-out for government issues. The long-term ownership relief does not reach a coupon — it works only on the financial result from disposal. That matters for anyone holding OFZ and still treating them, out of habit, as tax-free.

Dividends are a separate tax base. The tax is withheld at source, and neither the long-term ownership relief nor the income-type deduction on an investment account applies to it; a loss on shares cannot be used to reduce dividends. When you plan payouts from the dividend calendar, keep in mind that the nearest payments — {{dividend_calendar|limit=5}} — will arrive already net of tax.

Derivatives live by the rules of Article 214.1 of the Tax Code: the result on contracts over equity underlyings and the result on securities are netted against each other within defined limits, while contracts over commodity and currency underlyings are netted on their own, separately.

Step two: apply the long-term ownership relief

The mechanism sits in Article 219.1 of the Tax Code: if a security traded on an organised market was held continuously for no less than the period set by law, the positive financial result from its sale is exempt from tax up to a cap that is itself calculated from the length of the holding period. Clause 17.2 of Article 217 of the Tax Code works alongside it as a separate exemption for stakes and shares that are not traded on a market, on a longer holding requirement.

What breaks in practice: positions are written off FIFO, so a partial sale consumes the oldest lots — which are precisely the most relief-eligible ones. Transferring securities to another broker without correct documents on the acquisition date and price wipes out the ownership history in the eyes of the new agent. And the relief is never applied automatically to something the agent does not know about: you claim it by application to the broker or through a tax return.

Step three: decide whether you need an investment account, and which deduction

The new-type account, available since 2024, combines the deduction on contributions with an exemption of the income when the account is closed after the statutory term has run. The contribution deduction refunds personal income tax already paid on your other income and is computed from the amount contributed, within a legal constant — 13%. The income exemption suits those who have no taxable income outside the market, or who are counting on a large result.

The binding constraint: closing early unwinds everything — the deductions have to be returned, with interest for late payment. An investment account is therefore a decision about time, not about yield. Contracts concluded before 2024 continue to run under the old rules, and their terms are worth re-reading in the contract itself rather than from memory.

Step four: net the losses and carry the remainder forward

Within a calendar year the broker adds up the pluses and minuses across homogeneous bases on its own. Past that point, the work is yours.

If one broker's year closed in profit and another's in loss, only a tax return can combine them. If a loss could not be absorbed in full, Article 220.1 of the Tax Code allows it to be carried into future periods — but strictly for securities and contracts traded on an organised market, and strictly by way of a return, with supporting certificates for every loss-making year. The carry-forward window is capped by law, and any unused remainder vanishes when that window closes.

Step five: check the withholding and file

The return is filed by 30 April of the year following the reporting year, and the tax under it is paid by 15 July. That deadline is a working tool: it lets you first gather certificates from every broker and only then compute the total. Since 2025 a separate scale with a raised rate above a defined threshold applies to income from securities — look up both the rates and the threshold in the current wording of Article 224 of the Tax Code, because they have changed. Losing tax residency status changes the rate and shuts off access both to the long-term ownership relief and to the investment-account deductions.

Particular cases

Unit funds are not payers of profit tax, so dividends and coupons inside the fund are reinvested without withholding at that level, and the tax arises for the investor on the sale of the unit — to which, in turn, the long-term ownership relief does apply. This is not tax avoidance but a different point at which the tax arises; what you compare is the outcome, not the rate. The instrument list sits in the funds section.

Bonds carry a procedural trap that is not directly a tax matter but breaks the holding period all the same: a mandatory buyback under a put or call offer interrupts your ownership of the security regardless of your plans. The walkthrough is in the piece on bond offers.

What counts as a scheme rather than optimisation

Article 54.1 of the Tax Code draws the line: a transaction must have a business purpose beyond the tax one. Selling securities "to yourself" through affiliated accounts to manufacture a loss, gifting to a relative for the sole purpose of capturing an exemption, a formal change of residency with no actual relocation — all of it gets challenged, and the challenge is lost not over the rate but over the absence of economic substance in the operation.

What this piece does not contain

It contains no calculation of your particular tax: that depends on the composition of your portfolio, on your brokers, and on your other income. Nor does it cover the credit for tax withheld abroad: double-taxation treaties with a number of countries have been suspended since 2023, and the state of that list has to be checked as at the date of the transaction, not from a journal article. Terms used above are unpacked in the glossary.