What you will learn in this lesson
Every trade takes money from you twice: once when you buy and once when you sell. That money is neither profit nor loss; it is a certain cost, paid whether the market rises or falls. In this lesson you will learn how fees and taxes are calculated in Iran's stock, housing, car and gold and coin markets, whether each item falls on the buyer or the seller, and why percentages that look small badly erode the real return of an active trader. Hypothetical figures in this lesson are marked with "suppose", and every real figure carries its date and source.
Definitions
- Transaction fee: the amount paid for the trade to be executed, split among the market's institutions; on the stock exchange, among the brokerage, the Securities and Exchange Organization, the Central Securities Depository and the Exchange Technology Management Company. A fee has nothing to do with your profit or loss and depends only on the value of the trade.
- Transfer tax: a tax levied at the moment ownership changes, not on the gain. In other words, you pay it even if you sell at a loss.
- Tax base: the number the tax rate is applied to. Whether the base is the market price or an official "transactional value" can change the final tax bill several times over, as the housing section below shows.
- Value added tax (VAT): a consumption tax that sits on the invoice for a good or service and is ultimately borne by the final consumer. Its standard rate in 1405 (2026) is 10 percent.
- Capital gains tax: a tax levied not on the full value of a trade but only on the profit, the difference between purchase and sale price.
- Net return: what actually remains after every fee and tax is deducted. This is the only figure you can meaningfully compare against inflation or against another market's return.
The mechanism: cost at both ends of a trade
Most traders see only the purchase price and the sale price and assume profit is the difference between them. The chain in fact has four links: purchase price, cost of buying, sale price, cost of selling. The two costs together are the round-trip cost.
This mechanism produces a key concept: the break-even point. The price must rise by at least the round-trip cost before you even reach zero. If an asset's round-trip cost is 1.25 percent, a 1 percent gain in price is still a loss for you, not a profit. The more often you trade, the more times you cross this line, and the costs pile up.
The numbers in the stock market
The stock exchange has the most transparent cost table, because every figure in it is approved and published. Based on the brokerages' published fee tables (read on 11 Mordad 1405, 2 August 2026):
- Total buy fee for shares on the Tehran Stock Exchange: 0.003712 of the trade value, about 0.37 percent.
- Total sell fee for shares: 0.0088 of the trade value, that is 0.88 percent. There is a clear reason the sell side is heavier: the share transfer tax, equal to half a percent of the trade value, is contained inside that figure.
- Round-trip total: 0.012512, close to 1.25 percent. On Iran Farabourse the buy fee is slightly lower (0.003632) and the round trip comes to about 1.24 percent.
Three points usually escape newcomers. First, in the capital market the buyer pays no tax; the tax is collected from the seller alone. Second, this tax is indifferent to your profit: a seller sitting on a loss pays the same half percent. Third, trades in investment fund units are exempt from the transfer tax and carry lower fees too; the fee for trading units of gold-based commodity funds is 0.24 percent of the trade value on each side, and for gold coin deposit certificates on the Iran Mercantile Exchange it is 0.125 percent. This structural difference is part of the answer to why buying gold through a fund works out cheaper than buying it physically, a subject opened up separately in the lesson on gold funds.
A worked example
Suppose you buy 100,000,000 tomans of shares and sell them some time later at exactly the same price. The price has not moved, yet you are not flat; you are down:
- Buy fee: 100,000,000 times 0.003712 equals 371,200 tomans.
- Sell fee and tax: 100,000,000 times 0.0088 equals 880,000 tomans.
- Total: 1,251,200 tomans, leaving your capital at 98,748,800 tomans.
Now suppose you repeat that cycle twelve times in a year, moving your whole capital each time. The cumulative cost reaches roughly 14 to 15 percent of your capital. In other words, before anyone judges whether your analysis was right or wrong, you have to generate about 15 percent a year simply to stand still. This simple calculation shows the difference between an active trading strategy and a holding strategy better than any theoretical argument.
In the Iranian market
Housing: a high rate on a low base
Article 59 of the Direct Taxes Act sets the definitive transfer tax on real estate at 5 percent, and the tax on the transfer of goodwill rights (sarqofli) at 2 percent. But the decisive element is not the rate, it is the base: those 5 percent are calculated on the "transactional value" announced by the Tax Administration, not on the day's market price, and the transactional value is usually far below the real price. The result is that the tax burden of buying and selling a home in Iran is light in practice, while the agency commission (by tariff, 0.5 percent on the first 500 million tomans and 0.25 percent on the excess, from each side separately, plus VAT) makes up the larger share of the transaction cost. The details of that calculation appear in the lesson on housing as an asset.
Cars: settled before the plates change
In 1405 (2026) the vehicle transfer tax equals 1 percent of the current value of a domestically produced car and 2 percent for an imported one, with the reference value announced by the Tax Administration. Two practical points matter: the tax is payable by the seller, and it must be settled online before the licence plates are changed; until it is settled, the transfer of ownership stops there. Annual municipal charges and outstanding traffic fines must also be cleared before that same step.
Gold and coin: tax on the making charge and margin only
When you buy gold jewellery, the 10 percent VAT applies only to the making charge and the seller's margin, not to the value of the gold metal itself; calculating the tax on the full invoice amount is a violation. The complete chain of that calculation is set out step by step in the lesson on how gold is priced in Iran. On the coin side there is a lump-sum tax, set in tiers according to the number of coins bought from the central bank and official channels; buying and selling coins second hand on the open market does not fall under it. Trading a gold coin deposit certificate on the Iran Mercantile Exchange, by contrast, carries no transfer tax.
A new layer: the tax on speculation
The Law on Taxing Speculation and Profiteering, known in economic literature as the capital gains tax, was passed by parliament in Tir 1404 (July 2025). It targets the profit made on trading four groups of assets: real estate, passenger cars, gold and jewellery, and foreign currency and crypto assets. The point that matters most to a retail investor is that exchange-traded instruments are exempt: shares, securities, investment fund units and gold coin deposit certificates. That exemption is not accidental; the policymaker deliberately keeps the exchange route cheaper than the physical route, so that capital enters the capital market instead of being stockpiled as coins and banknotes.
Common mistakes
- "One percent is nothing." One percent per trade, multiplied by the number of trades in a year, can end up larger than your entire annual return. Always compute cost annually and cumulatively, not one trade at a time.
- Conflating fees with taxes. A fee pays for a service and is charged to both sides; a transfer tax is the government's share and, in shares, housing and cars alike, falls on the seller.
- Applying the 5 percent property tax to the market price. The base of that tax is the official transactional value; swapping the two makes any estimate of transaction cost wrong by a wide margin.
- Accepting VAT on the whole gold invoice. The base is only the making charge and the seller's margin; itemising those on the invoice is your right.
- Comparing two markets by nominal return. Returns on stocks, housing and gold are not comparable until each one's transaction cost has been deducted. A market with a lower nominal return but a far lower transaction cost can be the better one in practice.
Summary
Fees and taxes are the only certain, known-in-advance part of any trade: future returns are a guess, while these costs have exact figures. Remember three things: cost exists at both ends of a trade and raises the break-even point; on the stock exchange the tax is collected from the seller alone and fund instruments are exempt from it; and in physical markets what determines the final bill is usually not the tax rate but the calculation base and the intermediary's commission. Before any decision, subtract the round-trip cost from the expected return, and judge afterwards.
In the previous lesson on keeping crypto safe we saw what owning a digital asset actually means; in this one we saw what that same ownership costs when it changes hands. The full list of lessons is available in the Sahmino Academy section.
