Got a 1099-K for Selling Your Own Used Stuff? How to Report It

Why you got a form at all

For 2025 and 2026, a payment app or online marketplace has to file a 1099-K for you only when your payments on that platform are more than $20,000 and come from more than 200 transactions. Both tests must be passed. That rule came back retroactively under P.L. 119-21, as the IRS explains in IR-2025-107. A closet clean-out rarely gets there. Forms still arrive for three reasons:

• A platform may send one anyway. The IRS says apps and marketplaces may send a 1099-K for lower amounts or fewer transactions.
• Card payments have no threshold. If buyers paid you by card through your own merchant account, the IRS fact sheet says you should receive a 1099-K for as little as $0.01 of card payments.
• Your state may be lower. Massachusetts requires forms at $600 or more, any number of transactions. Vermont’s tax department says $2,000 or more. Illinois’ publication states over $1,000 and four or more transactions, though its wording covers the 2020–2023 reporting periods and no newer amount is published. A few other states are listed as lower by marketplaces or payment processors, but their current amounts aren’t confirmed on the states’ own pages. The checker below marks each one that way instead of guessing.

Here is one clean-out run through our 1099-K checker: $1,850 of sales in 14 transactions on one marketplace in 2026.

Whether or not a form arrives, the IRS’s position is the same: all income is taxable unless the law says otherwise. A form also doesn’t make anything taxable by itself.

What counts as a personal item

The IRS describes a personal item as something you owned for personal use, such as a car, refrigerator, furniture, stereo, jewelry or silverware. Clothes you wore, a couch you sat on and tickets you bought to use yourself fit that description.

Things you bought in order to resell don’t. A thrift-store jacket bought to flip is inventory, and its sale belongs either to a business (Schedule C) or, if there’s no profit motive, to a hobby. The hobby or business guide covers that line. Many sellers have both kinds of sales on one form, and the IRS instructions below show how to split them.

Worked example: one form, a mix of losses and a gain

Say the $1,850 form above covers these sales. To keep the IRS arithmetic visible, the figures are sale prices, before fees and shipping (more on those below).

The IRS figures gain or loss on a personal item as the difference between what you paid and what you received, and it says to report losses and gains separately. A loss on one item can’t offset a gain on another. That gives two entries:

The $1,370 entry zeroes out the loss items so no tax is figured on them. The $980 of combined losses ($210.00 + $220.00 + $550.00) isn’t deductible and doesn’t reduce the sneaker gain. On Form 8949, the gain goes in Part I if you owned the sneakers one year or less (short-term) and Part II if longer.

To run the same split on your own items, change the lines below; they start with this example.

Two ways to report the loss items

The IRS gives two options on its What to do with Form 1099-K page:

1. The entry space at the top of Schedule 1. The 2025 Form 1040 instructions use a couch bought for $1,000 and sold for $700: you enter $700 there. If only part of the form’s box 1a was for personal items sold at a loss, you enter only that part. The rest is reported where it belongs.
2. Form 8949, with code “L”. The Form 8949 instructions say to enter the proceeds and your cost, enter “L” in column (f), and enter in column (g) the adjustment that brings the gain or loss in column (h) to $0. The result carries to Schedule D.

The IRS fact sheet FS-2025-08 uses the same logic with a refrigerator bought for $1,000 and sold for $700: a $300 loss, not deductible, and $700 entered at the top of Schedule 1. Its ticket example shows the split. One set of tickets sold at a $550 gain goes on Form 8949 and Schedule D, and another set sold at a $50 loss is handled by entering its $200 sale price at the top of Schedule 1.

Several forms, fees and shipping

• More than one form. If you get several 1099-Ks covering personal items sold at a loss, FS-2025-08 says to report the combined amounts in the entry space at the top of Schedule 1.
• The box 1a figure is gross. The IRS says it isn’t adjusted for fees, credits, refunds, shipping, cash equivalents or discounts, and that those amounts aren’t taxable income. Your marketplace’s sales report shows them for each order.
• Fees on a gain item. For sales not reported on Form 1099-B, 1099-DA or 1099-S, the Form 8949 instructions describe proceeds as gross proceeds minus selling expenses such as commissions. Ask a tax professional how that applies to marketplace fees and shipping on your gain items.
• A wrong form. If the form includes money that wasn’t a sale at all, like a friend paying you back, the IRS says to ask the issuer for a corrected form. If it doesn’t arrive in time, enter the incorrect amount at the top of Schedule 1.

Records to keep

The weak point in most personal-item reporting is proving what you paid. FS-2025-08 suggests finding or estimating it from old bank or credit card statements, or by asking the store or person who sold it to you. Keep:

1. The marketplace’s sales report for the year, matched to the form’s box 1a.
2. For each item, what you paid and roughly when you bought it: receipts, order confirmations or card statements.
3. Notes on which sales were personal items and which were items bought to resell.
4. A copy of every 1099-K and any correction request.

Next step

Run your own platform totals through the 1099-K checker to see whether a federal or state form should be expected. It also links each state’s rule to its source. If some of your sales were items you bought to resell, the reseller taxes guide explains how those are reported. The payment app fees guide covers forms from payment apps.