Does Kalshi Send You a 1099 If You Profit $600? No. Here's 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 the $600 number actually comes 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.

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 Kalshi does and doesn’t send

Here’s the fuller picture of what may or may not land in your inbox 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.

No form does not mean no tax

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.

The one number that actually 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.