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Step-by-step mode · nothing is ever locked
Your gold-tax interview
Records · products
What do you actually own?
One product per provider, account, and legal character. The legal agreement decides the US tax treatment — the marketing name does not. Every product can be edited or deleted at any time, and nothing is committed until you press Save.
Reference: the seven product families
Pick the one your custody agreement matches. “Use” pre-fills a new product with that classification.
Records · USD tax lots
Purchases, disposals & costs
Every entry is translated at its own transaction-date rate: USD = foreign amount × USD-per-unit on that date. Purchase fees increase basis; selling fees reduce proceeds.
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Never use one average annual AUD rate. Basis is fixed at the acquisition-date rate and proceeds at the disposition-date rate; the spread between them is part of your US gain, not a separate currency item. AUD retained after a sale is a separate §988 asset whose later conversion produces ordinary gain or loss.
| Date | Type | Product / lot ID | Quantity | Gross | FX USD/unit | USD value | Note |
|---|
Matched realized lots for 2026
Long-term requires a disposition more than one year after acquisition — the day after the anniversary, not the anniversary itself.
| Sale | Buy lot | Character | Days held | Qty | Proceeds | Basis | Gain / (loss) |
|---|
Storage, fabrication & custody costs
Record every payment. Recurring investor fees default to track only: since 2026 they are permanently nondeductible miscellaneous itemized deductions. Only a direct, documented acquisition, fabrication/improvement, or disposition cost can adjust a lot.
| Date | Product | Category | Foreign amount | USD cost | USD / covered oz | Tax treatment | Linked lot |
|---|
Capital gains from the gold ledger
Generated locally. Form 8949 layout; carryovers and limits are applied by your tax software.
Result · gains only
2026 gains for your return
One row per matched lot, in Form 8949 column order. A foreign custodian issues no Form 1099-B, so short-term rows go in Box C and long-term rows in Box F. Nothing else about your return is assumed.
| (a) Description | (b) Acquired | (c) Sold | (d) Proceeds | (e) Basis | (f) Code | (g) Adjustment | (h) Gain / (loss) | Box | Days |
|---|
Totals to carry across
Schedule D Part I / Part II lines 3 and 10, plus the collectibles figure your software asks for separately.
What your tax software still does
Deliberately outside this mode.
US / Australian Gold Tax Planning Report
Generated locally. Planning estimate, not a filed return.
Live calculation
2026 tax estimate
Display is rounded; the engine keeps cents. Federal income tax uses the published annual bracket formula rather than the IRS tax table.
Federal calculation
Form 1040 planning waterfall
State calculation
Capital-gain detail
Collectible gain carries a 28% maximum rate, not a flat 28% rate.
Deduction detail
Standard vs itemized, the 2026 §68 haircut, and the itemized builder if enabled.
Likely forms & records
Derived from the facts entered. Not an exhaustive return organizer.
Result · every input
Full tax profile
Annual US-dollar amounts. Anything you set in the guided interview appears here and vice versa — there is exactly one copy of each number.
Filing facts
Drives brackets, age additions, NIIT, Social Security inclusion and every reporting threshold.
Decimal, e.g.
.0495.Entered as a finished number; nothing is derived from it.
Earned income
Schedule C profit drives both income tax and self-employment tax; W-2 wages consume the Social Security wage base first.
W-2 box 3; reduces the remaining wage base for SE tax.
W-2 box 5; feeds the 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax.
Deductible SEP / SIMPLE / solo 401(k). Reduces AGI and QBI — never SE tax.
Reduces AGI and QBI.
Reduces AGI only (e.g. HSA, student-loan interest).
Investment & retirement income
Do not re-enter ledger gains here — they are computed from your transactions.
Not taxed, but counted in the Social Security provisional-income test.
Must be ≤ ordinary dividends; the engine caps it.
Ordinary income, but excluded from NIIT by §1411(c)(5).
From converting or spending AUD you kept after a sale.
Other capital items
Gains positive, losses negative. Carryovers are entered as positive loss amounts.
Non-ledger collectibles: coins, art, other metals, §1202 28% items.
Form 6781; split 40% short-term / 60% long-term regardless of holding period.
Schedule D line 19; maximum 25% rate.
Deductions
Choose one source of truth for itemized deductions: a single verified number, or the built-in builder that applies the 2026 floors and caps.
Already net of the SALT cap, the 7.5% medical floor and the new 0.5% AGI charitable floor.
NC allows mortgage interest + real-estate tax capped at $20,000 combined, plus charitable and medical.
Only the excess over 7.5% of AGI counts.
2026: deductible only above 0.5% of AGI. AGI ceilings (60% cash / 30% appreciated) are not modeled.
Investment interest, casualty in a federal disaster area, gambling losses to the extent of winnings.
Manual expert outputs
Computations this tool deliberately refuses to guess. Enter finished numbers only.
Added after the rate schedule; it is not a bracket amount.
Only the excess tentative minimum tax.
Rents, royalties, passive K-1 income, or allocable investment expenses as a negative.
Credits, state adjustments & payments
Enter a foreign tax credit only after confirming the levy is creditable and correctly sourced.
NC: Bailey retirement benefits, §1256 adjustments, military pay, etc.
Above $150,000 ($75,000 MFS) the prior-year safe harbour rises to 110%.
Result · foreign information returns
Separate filing tests
FBAR, Form 8938, Form 8621, Schedule B Part III and the foreign-trust forms are five independent tests with different definitions, thresholds, filers and penalties. Tax owed can be zero while a form is still mandatory.
Other foreign holdings
Product values come from the Products page. Add unrelated foreign accounts and assets here so the aggregate tests are right.
FBAR aggregates every account, including ones you only sign on.
Threshold snapshot
US person living in the United States.
The PFIC annual-report exception is narrow and generally unavailable once you have a disposition gain or an excess distribution. It never converts PFIC gain into ordinary capital gain.
Your preliminary filing screen
“Review” appears wherever the contract or account status — not a number — controls the answer.
2026 planning edition · authorities checked 15 September 2026
Gold’s tax result starts with what you legally own.
A US person is taxed in US dollars on worldwide income. “Gold at an Australian bank” can mean titled bullion, an unsecured claim on a dealer, a foreign fund, a security, or a retirement asset — and those are not interchangeable. Fix the contract before you enter a single trade.
Two modes, switchable at any time from the header. Gains only turns the ledger into Form 8949 rows and stops. Full planner adds the complete federal and state estimate and the foreign-form screen. Everything is computed in this browser; the only data that leaves is what you export yourself.
All five filing statusesNC · custom state · no-tax stateOffline · no upload2026 researched rates
Why gold is taxed differently
The single rule that surprises people most, stated precisely.
Bullion is a collectible — deliberately
§1(h)(5)(A) defines collectibles gain by cross-reference to §408(m), which includes “any metal or gem”. §408(m)(3) carves out certain coins and sufficiently pure bullion — but that carve-out exists only so an IRA may hold them, and §1(h)(5)(A) expressly refuses to apply it for rate purposes. So the same American Eagle that is IRA-eligible is still a collectible when you sell it personally.
Consequence: long-term gold gain is taxed at your ordinary rate, capped at 28% — not at 0/15/20%. Short-term gold gain has no cap at all and is taxed at full ordinary rates.
28% is a ceiling, not a rate
The Schedule D Tax Worksheet stacks income: ordinary income fills the brackets first, then collectible gain is taxed at whatever ordinary rate applies until that rate would exceed 28%, after which the excess is taxed at exactly 28%. A retiree with $40,000 of ordinary income pays 10–22% on much of a collectible gain; a high earner pays 28% on nearly all of it.
Add the 3.8% NIIT where it applies and the true federal ceiling on gold is 31.8%, plus state tax. North Carolina gives capital gains no preference at all — 3.99% flat on the same dollars.
Currency is two transactions, not one
Basis is locked at the USD value on the acquisition date; proceeds at the USD value on the disposition date. A rising AUD therefore increases your US gain even if the AUD price of gold never moved. Never average the rate across the year.
If you leave the sale proceeds sitting in AUD, that AUD is now a separate §988 asset. Converting or spending it later produces ordinary gain or loss measured from the rate on the day you received it — no capital rates, no 28% cap.
No §1031, no automatic wash-sale relief
Since 2018 §1031 applies only to real property, so swapping bars for coins, or gold for silver, is a fully taxable disposition. Using ounces to pay a storage invoice is also a disposition of those ounces.
§1091 wash-sale rules literally reach “stocks or securities”, which physical bullion is not — but shares in a gold ETF are securities, and options, straddles, related parties and prearranged repurchases all have their own rules. Treat a same-week buy-back as a question for your adviser, not a certainty.
First: classify the Australian product
Read the legal agreement for title, custody, redemption rights and issuer domicile. A provider calling something a “gold account” establishes nothing about its US tax treatment.
Four recordkeeping decisions to make now
These determine what is taxable, and keep an economic cost view strictly separate from the IRS filing calculation.
Return method
FIFO
Oldest units are sold first. The required default whenever you did not make and document a valid specific identification. It tends to realize your lowest-basis gains first.
Best when documented
Specific identification
Name the exact bars, certificates or lots to the custodian by the settlement deadline and keep the written confirmation. That lets you sell high-basis metal first. This app requires explicit buy-lot IDs on the sale so the record matches the election.
Planning only
HIFO preview
Shows the economics of highest-basis-first. HIFO is not a standalone federal election for property: file this result only if each actual sale satisfied specific-identification rules against those lots.
Not a filing method
Average cost per ounce
Useful for comparing storage or fabrication economics only. Averaging is available for regulated investment company shares, not for directly held bullion; gain is computed lot by lot on an actual disposition.
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Two views, deliberately separated. The IRS view recognizes gain only when gold is sold, redeemed, exchanged, gifted for value, or used to pay a fee. The economic view can subtract storage and fabrication cash from the change in market value — but it is not “capital gains due”, and it never touches the tax calculation.
What this tool will not do for you
Stated plainly, so you know where the boundary is.
Reference · legal planning choices
Choose tactics; keep the legal boundary
Tick options to build a planning list you can copy out. These are alternatives with different economics and different risk — not loopholes, and not automatic deductions.
Reference · rates, years & data
Settings, data & sources
2026 is the researched base year. Clone it for a later year, then replace every indexed value with final federal and state guidance before you rely on it.
Selected year settings
High-frequency values here; the full JSON exposes every bracket and threshold.
Rates are decimals. Bracket arrays are seven upper bounds, ending with a very large final bound.
Data controls
A draft of your work is kept in this browser so a reload does not lose it; the only durable copy is a file you save. Saving, loading, start-over, the worked example and the reset all live under “Manage sessions” in the header.
DraftAutosaved in this browser
Durable copyA .json file you save to disk
Network callsNone
Currency methodTransaction-date USD
Built-in year2026 researched
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Cloned future years are marked unverified. Update ordinary brackets, capital-gain thresholds, standard deductions, the Social Security wage base, QBI limits, SALT and state law before relying on them.
Where each number comes from
Every computed line is traceable to one of these authorities. Links need internet access; the calculator itself does not.
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Scope: educational tax-planning software, not legal or tax advice. It does not sign, transmit, or produce filing-ready forms. Confirm the Australian contract, the US entity classification, the source of any Australian tax, PFIC/QEF statement availability, and current-year forms with a cross-border CPA or tax attorney.