Crypto Tax Calculator: 2026 Gains, Staking, and 1099-DA

The calculator above applies real 2026 rates to your inputs: proceeds minus basis, held over or under a year, plus ordinary income for staking or mining rewards. The math takes seconds. What decides whether your return survives scrutiny is the transaction record behind the inputs.

The reporting ground has shifted. Brokers began reporting gross proceeds on Form 1099-DA for transactions starting January 1, 2025, and must add cost basis for covered assets acquired on or after January 1, 2026. The IRS now sees your disposals whether or not you report them, and mismatches generate automated notices.

At the same time, basis tracking moved to a per-wallet requirement. The era of pooling all your holdings into one universal basis method ended; each wallet or account stands alone, and specific-identification choices must be documented by the time of sale.

Income events deserve special care because they are taxed twice in sequence, correctly: once as ordinary income at receipt, then again (or in your favor) as capital gain or loss measured from that receipt-date basis when you later sell. Airdrops and hard-fork coins follow the same receipt-at-fair-value logic once you have dominion and control. Recording the receipt-date value is therefore not optional; it is the basis that protects you at the eventual sale.

Holding period starts the day after acquisition and runs to the disposal date, per lot. Rewards and income coins each start their own clocks at receipt, so a wallet accumulating weekly staking rewards holds dozens of lots with dozens of clocks. This is tedious by hand and trivial for software, which is the honest argument for using a crypto tax platform even in simple years.

Note what the example quietly assumes: a known basis and a known acquisition date. When either is missing, the conservative default is a zero basis, which taxes the entire proceeds. That is the practical cost of lost records, and it is why reconstructing basis from old exchange statements, bank transfers, and blockchain history is usually worth the effort even when it is tedious. The IRS does not have your basis; with proceeds-only reporting it sees only what you sold for, and the difference between "gain" and "proceeds" is whatever you can document.

Crypto losses follow the normal capital loss rules: they offset gains without limit, then up to $3,000 per year against ordinary income, with the excess carrying forward indefinitely.

The wash-sale rule of IRC 1091 does not apply to directly held crypto under current law, because the statute covers securities and crypto is classified as property. Selling at a loss and repurchasing quickly remains permitted for coins held directly, while crypto ETFs and similar securities-wrapped products are treated as securities subject to wash-sale rules in broker reporting. Proposals to extend wash-sale treatment to digital assets remain proposals, not law.

Two cautions before treating that as a free lunch. Instant same-day sell-and-rebuy patterns invite economic substance scrutiny under IRC 7701(o), and the legislative window could close. Our crypto wash-sale guide covers the current line in detail.

A worked loss illustration: a coin bought for $20,000 and now worth $12,000 can be sold to realize an $8,000 loss that offsets other gains, and under current law the position can be repurchased promptly because the wash-sale statute does not reach directly held crypto. Against $8,000 of short-term gains at a 32% marginal rate, the harvest is worth about $2,560; against long-term gains at 15%, about $1,200. The same trade in a crypto ETF would trip the wash-sale rule and defer the loss.

Since January 1, 2025, basis must be tracked per wallet and per account (Treas. Reg. 1.1012-1, with a Rev. Proc. 2024-28 safe harbor for allocating pre-2025 holdings). If you intend to sell specific lots rather than defaulting to first-in-first-out, the specific identification must be documented no later than the sale.

For each disposal, your file should show: acquisition date and cost (including fees), the wallet it sat in, disposal date and proceeds, and the fair market value used for any income event. Exchange exports plus a crypto tax software reconciliation usually get there; a shoebox of screenshots does not.

Expect the first wave of 1099-DA mismatch notices as forms issued in early 2026 meet returns prepared from incomplete records. The taxpayers who reconcile wallets before filing answer those notices with a spreadsheet; the ones who do not answer them with amended returns.

Treat the annual close like a small audit: reconcile every wallet’s year-end balance against the sum of its recorded lots, match every exchange form against your own ledger, and archive the raw exports, since exchanges shut down and purge history. The taxpayers with the cheapest filing seasons are the ones whose records could survive the platform disappearing entirely.

The rollout is deliberately staged, and each stage changes what your records must prove. Proceeds-only reporting (2025 transactions, forms issued in early 2026) means the IRS sees your sales but not your costs, so an unreported or under-documented disposal looks like pure gain until you prove otherwise. Basis reporting for covered assets acquired from 2026 forward gradually closes that gap, but only for coins bought and kept on the reporting platform.

The per-wallet rules are the quieter change with the bigger record-keeping bite. Before 2025, many taxpayers pooled basis across every wallet under a universal method. Now each wallet and account tracks its own lots, transfers between wallets carry their basis with them, and the allocation of pre-2025 holdings to wallets was supposed to be made under the Rev. Proc. 2024-28 safe harbor, with Notice 2025-7 providing temporary relief for 2025. If that allocation never happened, fixing the records is a project best done before a notice arrives, not after.

Specific identification survives, per wallet: you may choose which lots you are selling, but the choice must be documented no later than the sale, and it must be consistent with what the wallet actually held. Retroactive lot-picking at tax time, the old habit, no longer works.

Expect imperfect forms for years. Brokers inherit no knowledge of transferred-in basis, cost-basis reporting phases in by acquisition date, and platforms interpret the rules differently. File from your reconciled ledger and reconcile differences on Form 8949, which has adjustment columns for exactly this situation.