Does Kalshi Send You a 1099 If You Profit $600? No. What Actually Gets Reported

No. Kalshi does not send you a 1099 for your trading profit at $600, or at any amount. This is one of the most common filing mistakes among prediction-market traders, and it comes from mixing up two completely different things: the $600 threshold that applies to certain miscellaneous income, and the tax on your actual trading gains, which works nothing like that.

Where does the $600 number come from?

The $600 figure is a real threshold, but not for trading. It’s the long-standing reporting floor for miscellaneous income, like referral bonuses, promotional credits and rewards: the kind of thing reported on a Form 1099-MISC. If a platform pays you a referral bonus above that threshold, it may send a 1099-MISC for that bonus. For payments made from 2026 the threshold rises to $2,000, so a 2026 referral bonus under $2,000 may come with no form at all.

Your profit from buying and selling event contracts is not miscellaneous income. It’s a trading gain, and gains from trading contracts are not reported to you on a 1099-MISC at all. So the $600 rule never touches your trading P&L. People search “does Kalshi send a 1099 if I profit $600” because they’ve heard $600 somewhere, but the answer they’re looking for is about the wrong form.

What does Kalshi send, and what doesn’t it send?

These are the forms that may or may not reach you from Kalshi:

• No 1099 for trading profit or loss. The gain or loss on your event contracts is not reported to you (or the IRS) on any 1099. You compute it from your own trade history.
• Possibly a 1099-INT: if Kalshi paid you interest on your cash balance, that interest is reported like any other interest income.
• Possibly a 1099-MISC for referral or reward credits, subject to the miscellaneous-income threshold. This is the form the “$600” myth is actually about, and it’s about bonuses, not trades.
• Possibly 1099-B / 1099-DA information: if you funded or withdrew via crypto, the crypto deposit and off-ramp legs can generate digital-asset reporting. That reporting is about the crypto movements, not your Kalshi trading result, but it’s exactly the kind of form that creates an IRS mismatch notice if your return ignores it.

I got a 1099-B from Kalshi. Does it cover my trades?

No. Kalshi’s help center lists the 1099-B, and the newer 1099-DA, for crypto deposits and withdrawals handled by its crypto partner, ZeroHash. The form reports the crypto leg, not your event-contract result. Report that crypto sale with its own cost basis, then report your trading gain or loss separately, from your P&L file. Which Kalshi file to use.

Do you owe tax with no form?

This is the part that trips people up. A 1099 is a convenience, not the thing that makes income taxable. Income is taxable because the law says it is, not because a form showed up. If you profited on Kalshi, that profit is reportable whether or not you ever receive a piece of paper about it. “I didn’t get a 1099” is not a defense. It’s just a missing convenience that shifts the record-keeping onto you.

And because no 1099 states your gain for you, you have to reconstruct it: export your full trade history, net your wins against your losses, and report the result under whichever tax treatment applies to you. Which treatment that is (ordinary, capital, Section 1256, or gambling) is a genuinely unsettled question, and it changes your bill dramatically. We walk through all four in how Kalshi and Polymarket trades are taxed, and the cheapest-but-most-contested one in the Section 1256 breakdown.

Which number matters?

Forget $600. The number that determines your Kalshi tax bill is your net trading profit for the year, computed from every closed position, and then run through the right treatment. If you want that number and all four possible tax outcomes side by side without hand-building a spreadsheet, that’s exactly what the tool below does from your Kalshi export.