Robinhood event contracts: the annual statement is not a tax form
Robinhood sends a real 1099 for your stocks and a different, weaker document for your event contracts. Traders assume both are tax forms. Only one of them is.
Two documents, one of which is not what you think
If you trade equities and event contracts in the same Robinhood account, you receive two different things at year end and they are not equivalent.
- Your stock and option activity comes on a consolidated Form 1099, a real IRS information return that is also filed with the IRS.
- Your event contract activity comes on an Event Contracts Annual Statement, which Robinhood has said is not a substitute tax reporting form.
Robinhood has stated it will not provide 1099s for event contract trades. Read that sentence in its own words on your own statement rather than taking it from anyone else, because it is the single most consequential fact about your filing and it is printed on the document.
Why the distinction matters in practice
A 1099-B has already been filed with the IRS and is designed to be transcribed onto Form 8949. An annual statement is a courtesy summary. It has not been filed anywhere, it does not determine how your trades are characterized for federal tax purposes, and it does not carry the evidentiary weight of an information return if your position is ever examined. If you copy its total onto a return and stop there, you have a number with nothing underneath it.
What the statement does and does not carry
The statement is genuinely useful as a starting point. It typically lists individual event contract transactions with closing dates, costs, proceeds, fees and commissions, and a net result. That is more than Polymarket gives you and more than the Kalshi CSV gives you without work.
What it does not do:
- It does not decide your treatment. Whether your gains are capital, gambling or other income is not settled by a document Robinhood generated, and the statement says as much.
- It does not give you holding periods in a form 8949 wants. If capital treatment applies, short term and long term go in different parts of the form, and that split has to come from your own dates.
- It does not separate gross wins from gross losses. Under a gambling treatment that separation is the whole return, and a net figure cannot produce it.
- It does not cover your other venues. If you also traded on Kalshi or Polymarket, that activity is invisible to it and has to be rebuilt separately and combined.
The multi venue problem
Most people in this market are not on one platform. A typical year looks like some Robinhood event contracts, a Kalshi account opened when Robinhood did not list the market they wanted, and a Polymarket wallet for the markets neither of the other two carries.
Three venues, three totally different records: an annual statement, a per fill CSV in cents, and a public blockchain with no statement at all. They have to end up in one consistent record, using one calendar and one lot matching method, before any figure means anything.
Doing that by hand across three sources is where the errors come from, and the errors are not random. They lean toward overstating gain, because losses are the thing most likely to be missing from any of the three.
What to do with the statement when it arrives
- Save the PDF and any CSV export the moment it appears. Access to historical documents is not guaranteed forever.
- Reconcile it against your own record rather than trusting it outright. Count the positions. If your record has closed positions the statement does not show, or the reverse, find out which is wrong before you file.
- Build the per-position detail underneath the total, with acquired date, disposed date, basis and proceeds on every line. That is what supports the number if anyone asks.
- Combine every venue first, then decide treatment with a professional. Deciding treatment against a partial picture is how people end up amending.
Common questions
- Does Robinhood send a 1099 for prediction markets?
- Not for event contract trades. Robinhood has said it will not provide 1099s for those, and instead issues an Event Contracts Annual Statement that it explicitly describes as not a substitute tax reporting form. Your stock and option activity still comes on a normal consolidated 1099.
- Can I just file from the Event Contracts Annual Statement?
- It is a starting point, not an ending point. It has not been filed with the IRS, it does not determine how your trades are characterized, and it does not give you the holding period split or the gross win and gross loss separation that different treatments require. Keep it, reconcile against it, and build the per-position detail underneath it.
- Do I owe tax on Robinhood event contract profits without a 1099?
- Yes. Whether a platform issues an information return has no bearing on whether income is taxable. It only changes who has to assemble the numbers, and in this case that is you.
- I traded on Robinhood and Kalshi and Polymarket. How do I combine them?
- Convert all three into one per-position record using a single calendar and a single lot matching method, then total. The three sources arrive in completely different shapes, so the combining step is where most of the work and most of the mistakes are.