How to Report Cryptocurrency in TurboTax

It's worth saying plainly: cryptocurrency is generally treated as property for tax purposes, and a lot of crypto activities are taxable. Selling, trading one coin for another, or spending crypto can create a gain or loss, and earning crypto can count as income. The right move is to report it accurately.

This is an independent guide for general education, not tax advice, and we're not affiliated with Intuit.

Most crypto activity falls into two buckets:

• Capital gains and losses: from selling or trading crypto, based on the difference between what you paid and what you got.
• Income: from things like being paid in crypto or certain rewards, valued at the time you received it.

TurboTax handles both, but they get entered in different places.

Accurate reporting comes down to good records. Pull together:

• Transaction histories from each exchange or wallet you used.
• Dates, amounts, and the value at the time of each transaction.
• Your cost basis, meaning what you originally paid.
• Any tax forms an exchange provided.

TurboTax often supports importing crypto transactions, either directly from supported exchanges or by uploading a file from a crypto tax aggregator. Importing is far easier than typing out a pile of transactions by hand. After importing, review the entries, especially the cost basis, since gaps there are the most common source of errors.

If you have only a few transactions or you can't import, you can enter them by hand. For each sale or trade, you provide what you acquired, when, what you sold it for, and the cost basis. Take care with the dates, because how long you held an asset can affect how the gain is taxed.

Watch out for these pitfalls:

• Forgetting that trading one coin for another is a taxable event, not just cashing out to dollars.
• Missing transactions scattered across several exchanges or wallets.
• Leaving cost basis blank, which can overstate your gain.
• Overlooking crypto you received as income.