What You Can Write Off When You Sell Your House

Two numbers leave the closing table, and only one of them matters to the IRS. Confuse the wire amount with your taxable gain, and you’ll either hand over money you never owed or lose sleep over a bill that isn’t coming.

What can I write off when I sell my house? Sellers in Billings ask me that more than anything else. I buy houses here and across Yellowstone County, and tax returns aren’t my trade. I’ve read a pile of settlement statements, though, and I’ve sat across from plenty of sellers who assumed the wire was what they’d be taxed on. It isn’t. Usually, it isn’t even close.

Below is what shrinks your taxable profit on a home sale, what doesn’t, and where sellers in the Heights, the West End, and Lockwood quietly leave money behind. Every point traces back to actual IRS rules. I’ll also say plainly when a question belongs with a tax expert rather than a homebuyer.

None of this replaces professional advice on your own return. Use it so you walk into that meeting knowing what to ask.

Sale Price, Profit, and Taxable Gain Are Three Different Numbers

Calling most of these items “write-offs” is the first wrong turn.

The IRS won’t let you deduct your house the way a business deducts a work truck, which I learned fast after buying my first rental property. Two other mechanics do similar work instead. Certain costs come off your sale proceeds. Others get added to what the place costs you to begin with. Both shrink the gain. Neither shows up on your 1040 as a line labeled “deduction.”

Your gain runs in a straight line. Start with what the buyer paid. Subtract the expenses of selling, then subtract your adjusted basis. Adjusted basis means your original purchase price plus every improvement you paid for along the way. Whatever’s left is taxable gain.

Subtracting the mortgage payoff somewhere in that sequence is the mistake I see most. It belongs nowhere in it. When a wire shrinks by most of the sale price because a loan got paid off, the seller feels like they made almost nothing. Emotionally, that’s fair. The tax math never saw the loan. Escrow works the same way in reverse, since the refund your old servicer mails a few weeks after closing is your own money coming home, not income.

Run the steps in order and resist skipping ahead. Price, minus selling costs, minus basis, and the exclusion goes last. Sellers who apply the exclusion first tend to talk themselves out of tracking anything else. That’s the moment the records stop getting kept.

According to Redfin’s market data, the median Billings sale price sat at $390,000 across the three months ending in July 2026, running roughly 2.6 percent above the same window a year earlier. Somebody who bought a ranch-style place off Grand Avenue in 2012 could close at that median and still owe nothing, because their basis climbed with every roof, furnace, and finished basement.

Sellers who owe tax on a home sale are the exception in this town, not the rule.

My honest read after years of buying here: Billings hasn’t produced the runaway appreciation you see in Bozeman or Whitefish. The giant gains that blow past the federal exclusion stay rare outside long-held acreage and rental portfolios.

Paperwork is where people actually get hurt. Sloppy records turn a sale that should be tax-free into a sale you can’t prove is tax-free, and the burden of proof sits with you rather than the IRS.

One more piece of framing before the specifics. Tax law treats your main home very differently from a rental property, a second home, or land you’ve been sitting on. The same dollar of profit can be fully excluded, partly excluded, or fully taxable depending on how the property is used.

What Actually Reduces Your Tax Bill: The Short List

A couple of years back, two adult children called me about their mother’s house in Billings Heights. She’d moved into assisted living. They’d already watched two agent listings expire without a single offer on a home with 1970s wiring and a garage stacked to the rafters with canning jars. We bought it as-is that fall. Nobody touched a paintbrush or a dumpster.

Their tax picture turned out simple, and it usually does once you know which levers exist. There are fewer of them than sellers expect.

Selling expenses come off first. Agent commissions, advertising costs, legal fees, and loan charges you agreed to cover for the buyer all reduce the amount you’re treated as having realized.

Improvements work from the other direction by raising your basis. A new roof counts. Repainting the trim before listing doesn’t.

Then the big one: the federal exclusion for a main home. A capital gain on your main home may qualify to stay out of your income entirely, up to $250,000 of it. Married couples filing jointly can exclude as much as $500,000, per the IRS in Topic no. 701.

Property taxes and mortgage interest get prorated at closing. Your share for the portion of the year you owned the house is deductible if you itemize on Schedule A. Most Montana homeowners take the standard deduction now, so this one quietly does nothing for plenty of sellers.

Depreciation claimed on a rental runs in reverse. It lowered your basis while you owned the place, so it raises your gain when you sell. That isn’t a punishment. It’s the bill for a benefit you already took.

Moving costs stay off the list for almost everybody. Active-duty military moves under orders are the narrow exception.

Everything else sellers bring me lands somewhere between helps your basis and helps nothing. Cleaning, staging, mowing, and new appliances that walked out the door with them. The sections below sort which is which.

If you want one question to open with at your preparer’s desk, use this: Does my gain look like it exceeds the exclusion, yes or no? The answer sets how much of the rest matters. Sellers comfortably under it can stop chasing small items and focus on clean reporting. Sellers near the line or over it should treat every receipt as money. I’ve watched a sale get messy over a receipt somebody forgot to save.

What Can You Write Off When You Sell Your House?

Bring me your closing statement, and I can tell you in about four minutes where your deductible costs are hiding. That one document does more work than the shoebox.

Commissions are the heaviest item on most listed sales in Yellowstone County. They reduce your amount realized, dollar for dollar, with no itemizing required.

Title and escrow charges, recording costs, and the attorney’s fee if you used one belong in the same bucket. So do seller concessions. Agree to cover a chunk of the buyer’s loan costs to hold a shaky sale together, and that money counts against your proceeds.

Advertising you paid for directly sits on the same list, like a for-sale-by-owner listing package or professional photos you bought. Keep the invoice.

Reading the statement is easier than it looks once you know the layout. Your closer hands you a seller’s settlement statement with two columns, and the debit side is where your costs live. Work down it line by line. Ask about anything you can’t identify by name. Escrow officers field that question all day and won’t think less of you for asking. If what you got at the table was a preliminary version, request the final signed one after funding, because prorations and last-minute credits sometimes shift between the two.

Prorated property taxes handled through escrow appear on the settlement statement, too. The Yellowstone County Treasurer’s office can confirm what was assessed and paid for your parcel if the numbers don’t match your memory.

This stance will annoy some people in my industry. Fussing over the deductibility of small selling costs is a poor use of a stressed seller’s energy, above all, since the exclusion usually swallows the whole gain anyway. Your time goes further on the sale price and the closing timeline than on whether a $300 fee belongs in column A or column B.

Sellers who fall outside the exclusion do need every one of these items documented. Inherited houses sold by an estate, rentals, second homes, and short-ownership sales all live in that territory.

Selling as-is changes the math rather than the tax rules. When we buy a house directly, there’s no commission, no lender-required repair list, and no concession negotiation at the eleventh hour. Fewer costs to track means a simpler basis calculation later. If you’re weighing that route, Billings Homebuyers will lay out the as-is number next to what a listing would likely net you after costs, and you can decide from there. We do the same for owners outside town who want to sell a house fast in Laurel.

Whatever path you pick, save the final signed settlement statement. Somewhere that isn’t a kitchen drawer.

What Is the Capital Gains Exclusion on a Home Sale?

Sounds too generous to be real, and that’s the reaction I get about half the time I mention it. It’s real, it’s been law for decades, and it’s the single biggest tax benefit attached to owning a home in this country.

Section 121 of the tax code is the provision, and the IRS lays out the whole thing in Publication 523, Selling Your Home. The exclusion applies to gain. Not to the sale price, and not to the cash you walk away with.

Two tests control eligibility: ownership and use. Both look back over the five years ending on your closing date.

On a joint return, one spouse has to clear the ownership test, but each of you has to clear the use test on your own. Couples get tripped up here after a late-in-life marriage, where one spouse kept a separate residence for a few years.

Three things knock you out flat. Using the exclusion on another sale within the two years ending on this sale date is the first. Acquiring the property through a 1031 like-kind exchange during the prior five years disqualifies it as well. Expatriate tax status is the third, and it’s rare enough that most sellers can skip that line.

Montana runs its own calculation on top of the federal one, something I’ve seen trip up sellers who only planned for the IRS. The state gives net long-term capital gains a separate rate table rather than taxing them like wage income. The Department of Revenue’s published tables set those rates at 3.0 percent and 4.1 percent for tax year 2026, with the breakpoint tied to filing status. Thresholds shift in later years, so pull the current table from the state before planning around any number.

You generally won’t owe Montana tax on federally excluded gain, since the state return starts from your federal figures. A taxpayer with a gain above the exclusion is the one who needs both sets of math.

Partial exclusions exist for sellers who miss the two-year mark for a qualifying reason. Job relocation, health problems, and certain unforeseeable events can each support a prorated exclusion, and Publication 523 spells out the safe harbors in detail.

Think you might fall into one of those camps? Start a written timeline now, while the details are fresh. Which month the job offer came, which month you listed, what the doctor said, and when. A partial exclusion claim rests on facts and dates, and memories go fuzzy by the following April.

How Ownership and Use Affect Your Home Sale Tax Deduction

Which is why the calendar deserves more attention than the receipts.

Own the home for at least 24 months out of the five years ending on your closing date, and you’ve met the ownership requirement. The use requirement runs on that same 24-month standard, measuring the time the place served as your main home.

Those months don’t have to run back-to-back. Someone who lived in a West End house for a year, rented it out for two, then moved back in for a year before selling, can still satisfy both tests.

How confident are you about the month you actually moved in? Most sellers guess, and guessing is how audits get uncomfortable.

Proof of residence is easier to assemble than people expect. Utility bills in your name, voter registration, your Montana driver’s license address, bank statements, and the address printed on prior income tax returns all point in the same direction when they agree.

Gather three or four and stop. You’re not building a legal case. You’re building a consistent story that a preparer can stand behind. It gets messy when the papers disagree, usually because the mail kept going to an old address or a license never got updated after a move. Fix the inconsistency now if you’re still in the house. Correcting an address today beats explaining a contradiction later.

Short-term absences don’t break your streak. A winter in Arizona, a summer at a cabin near Red Lodge, a long hospital stay: none of that stops the clock, as long as the Billings house stayed your primary residence.

Premarital ownership counts toward the joint exclusion, which surprises newer couples. If one spouse bought the house in 2019 and the other moved in after the wedding, the ownership clock started in 2019 for exclusion purposes.

Divorce has its own rules. Transferring the home or your share of it to a spouse or former spouse as part of a divorce settlement produces no gain or loss for tax purposes. The time the other spouse spent living there can sometimes count toward your use test under a written agreement.

Surviving spouses have a window worth knowing about. Sell within a limited period after a spouse’s death, and you may still claim the larger joint exclusion amount. That deadline is specific, so let a tax preparer or the publication itself confirm it for your dates before you list.

Heirs sit somewhere else entirely. Inherited property generally gets a basis adjusted to its value at the date of death. A house passed down and sold within a year or two often produces little or no gain at all.

What Happens If You Own Multiple Homes When You Sell One?

For years, I assumed the exclusion attached to the house rather than the person. That’s backward.

One main home at a time is the operating rule. You can own a place on the Rimrocks, a cabin near Nye, and a duplex in Lockwood, and only one of them qualifies as your main home for a given stretch.

The IRS looks at where you actually live when the answer isn’t obvious. Time spent at each property carries the most weight. Your mailing address, the address on your income tax returns, where you bank, where you work, and where your family lives all feed the call.

Second homes and vacation properties get no exclusion at all. Gain on those is taxable from the first dollar, offset only by your basis and selling costs.

Rental property runs on separate machinery. Rental income you collected got taxed as you went, depreciation reduced your basis year by year, and that depreciation comes back as ordinary income when you sell. The recapture piece can’t be excluded even if the property later served as your main home.

Converting a rental into your residence doesn’t reset the picture either. Periods of nonqualified use after 2008 reduce the share of gain you’re allowed to exclude, calculated as a ratio of nonqualified months to total ownership months.

That ratio is why the conversion crowd needs an accountant. Say you bought a small house in Lockwood, rented it to tenants for several years, then moved in yourself when circumstances changed. You may well qualify for a meaningful exclusion. Part of your gain stays taxable anyway, and the depreciation you claimed as a landlord comes back regardless. Pull your old Schedule E filings before that meeting. They’re the shortest route to an accurate answer.

Landlords selling a rental outright have a different tool available. A properly structured 1031 exchange defers the gain into a replacement property, though it carries hard deadlines and requires a qualified intermediary lined up before closing. Miss a date, and the deferral is gone.

Home office deductions claimed by a sole proprietor add another layer. Depreciation taken on that office space follows the same recapture rule as a rental, even though the rest of the house qualifies for the exclusion.

I’ve watched more than one Billings landlord discover their gain at the closing table instead of six months earlier, when something could still be done about it. Own rentals and thinking about selling one? The conversation with your accountant belongs before the listing, not after the contract.

That timing advice costs nothing and saves thousands.

Does Mortgage Debt Affect Your Home Sale Tax Deduction?

“If most of my proceeds go to pay off the mortgage, doesn’t that lower my gain?”

No. Your loan balance has nothing to do with taxable gain. A homeowner who paid cash and a homeowner who owes $200,000 on the identical house report the same gain on an identical sale.

Gain tracks the property’s price and basis. Debt is just how you financed ownership, and the payoff at closing moves your money to your lender.

The same logic covers a second mortgage or a home equity line. Paying off a HELOC at closing doesn’t reduce your gain, and borrowing against the house never created taxable income to begin with. What the borrowed money bought might matter, though. If you pulled equity out to add a bedroom or replace the siding, that spending belongs in your basis. In my experience buying houses, the loan paperwork is a decent starting point for reconstructing when the work happened.

Mortgage interest is a different question. Interest that accrued up to your closing date is deductible for that tax year if you itemize on Schedule A. Your prorated share of property taxes goes there too, under the state and local tax deduction rules. Your servicer’s year-end statement and the settlement statement together give you those figures.

Points you paid when you originally bought the home may have remaining unamortized balances. Selling can let you deduct what’s left, depending on how the points got treated at the time.

A prepayment penalty, if your mortgage loan carries one, is generally treated as interest as well. Most modern owner-occupant loans don’t have them. Older seller-financed notes around here sometimes do.

Short sales and foreclosures open a harder conversation. When a lender forgives mortgage debt, that forgiven amount can be taxable income, and it arrives on a 1099-C in January when you’re least expecting mail from anyone.

Publication 523 notes that the income exclusion for canceled or forgiven mortgage debt was extended through December 31, 2025. The discharged debt generally needs to be tied to a qualified principal residence under a written agreement made before January 1, 2026. Anyone facing a short sale now needs current guidance from a tax professional, because relief provisions like that one get extended, modified, or allowed to lapse by Congress.

Homeowners behind on payments often ask whether selling is worth it when the mortgage eats the proceeds. Usually yes. A completed sale protects your credit in a way a foreclosure judgment never will, and walking away with some equity beats walking away with none. If the payments have gotten ahead of you and a listing feels like too long a wait, you can sell your home for cash and pick the closing date yourself.

Which Selling Expenses Can You Deduct From Home Sale Profit?

Miss these, and you’ll pay tax on money that went straight to other people. That’s the whole consequence, and it lands hardest on sellers whose gain exceeds the exclusion.

Publication 523 keeps the list tight: costs the seller owed that the buyer paid count, along with commissions, advertising fees, legal fees, and loan charges you covered on the buyer’s behalf. Anything on that list reduces your amount realized.

Commission is the obvious one, and in Billings, it’s still the largest single expense on most listed sales.

Title insurance premiums charged to the seller, escrow fees, recording charges, and courier or wire fees on the seller’s side of the settlement statement all qualify as costs of sale. Nobody remembers these at tax time, which is why the statement matters more than your memory.

Buyer credits deserve special attention. Sellers in this market have been covering rate buydowns and closing cost credits to move properties, and every one of those dollars reduces what you realize. Redfin’s figures show Billings homes going under contract after an average of 58 days on market as of that same July 2026 reading. Slower markets are exactly where concessions pile up.

Attorney fees tied to the transaction count. Legal fees for an unrelated dispute with a neighbor don’t, even if the fight happened while the house sat listed.

Have you ever gone back and totaled every seller-side line on your last closing statement? Most people never do, and the number runs larger than the commission alone.

Buyers and sellers confuse inspection and appraisal costs because contracts assign responsibility differently. If you paid it as a condition of the sale, keep the receipt and let your preparer place it.

Leave the gray areas to your preparer and focus on what you control. Your job is handing it over: the signed settlement statement, the purchase contract with any addenda covering credits or repairs, and receipts for anything you paid outside of closing. Don’t pre-screen the pile by guessing what qualifies. Sellers who edit their own documents down to what they think counts are the ones who leave real money behind.

For estates and heirs selling a decedent’s property, the same expense list applies, though the return may be a fiduciary filing instead of a personal one. Executors who handle this themselves tend to miss the selling expenses altogether.

Paperwork discipline here takes twenty minutes and can outweigh a year of small deductions elsewhere on your return.

Which Selling Expenses Can’t Be Deducted From Home Sale Profit?

Two dumpsters and a weekend of hauling on the South Side buys you nothing on your tax return. Cleanout costs, junk removal, and the cousin you paid to haul scrap from the garage are personal expenses, full stop.

Routine maintenance falls in the same category. Fixing a leaking faucet, patching drywall, replacing a cracked window pane, servicing the furnace before a showing: none of it adds to basis on its own, and none of it is deductible.

Utilities, insurance premiums, homeowners association dues, and lawn care during the listing period stay off the return, too. They’re costs of owning, not costs of selling.

Mortgage principal payments never count. People try, and the logic is fair, since the money did leave their account. Principal simply reduces debt.

Moving expenses got narrowed years back. Publication 523 also spells out the improvements you can’t include in basis, and that section is worth reading twice if you did a lot of work on the place.

A loss of your main home is the cruelest rule in this whole area. A loss from selling your main home can’t be deducted from income on your tax return, even though a gain above the exclusion is fully taxable. Heads, the IRS wins; tails, you break even.

Losses on rental property behave differently, which is one more reason the main-home-versus-rental split keeps coming up here.

Staging fees, professional organizers, and pre-listing cosmetic refreshes aren’t on the IRS’s short list of selling expenses. I’d rather see a seller skip the $4,000 cosmetic refresh than chase a deduction that may not exist, and that goes double on a property headed for a rehab buyer.

Improvements you made and then removed don’t count either. That gorgeous deck you replaced in 2015 with a bigger deck? Only the current one lives in your basis.

None of this makes prep work pointless. Judge it on whether it moves the sale price or the timeline, not on whether it shows up on a return. Paint and a deep clean can earn their cost in a listed sale. They just earn it at the negotiating table, not on Schedule A.

Sellers with heavy repair lists sometimes find the cleanest answer is fixing nothing. A cash offer from Billings Homebuyers prices the house as it sits, so nobody’s spending non-deductible money on repairs to satisfy someone else’s lender.

Can You Deduct Home Improvements From Home Sale Profit?

Every dollar you sank into that kitchen comes back off your tax bill. That’s the version I hear across kitchen tables all over this county, and it falls apart at the word “deduct.”

Improvements don’t get deducted. They get added to the basis, and a higher basis shrinks your gain when you finally sell. The benefit is real. The mechanism is different, and it only pays off at closing.

What qualifies is narrower than the money spent on the house. An improvement adds to the home’s value, extends its useful life, or adapts it to a new use. A new roof, a finished basement, central air, a well, a septic system, an addition, replacement windows: all improvements.

Repairs sit on the other side of that line, with one useful exception. Repairs done as part of a larger project can be included, so patching the subfloor in the middle of a full bathroom remodel rides along with the remodel.

You’ll find a trap in energy upgrades. Energy credits and subsidies you received reduce what you can add to the basis. Claim a federal credit for new windows or a heat pump, and the credited portion doesn’t get counted twice.

Your own labor counts for zero. Materials you bought for a DIY basement finish add to the basis. The four hundred hours you spent on your knees do not.

Insurance reimbursements work the same way as credits. Hail season out here has funded plenty of new roofs across the Heights, and the portion your carrier paid isn’t your cost.

Permits pulled through the City of Billings or Yellowstone County create a paper trail that supports your basis years later. Homeowners who improve without permits often lack evidence that the work happened when the IRS asks.

Long-tenured owners accumulate the most value here and track it the worst. Thirty years in one house means thirty years of furnaces, water heaters, siding, and concrete work, and almost nobody kept the records.

If the receipts are gone, reconstruct what you can before giving up. Call the contractors still in business and ask for a copy of the original invoice. Most keep job files longer than homeowners keep paperwork, something I’ve confirmed more than once, tracking down records on my own flips. Pull old bank and credit card statements from your bank’s online archive. Check the permit records for the address. Dig up photos, even ones taken for other reasons. A picture of a birthday party in front of the old kitchen and another in front of the new one establishes that the work happened and roughly when. A reconstructed record is weaker than an invoice and far better than nothing.

Start a single file today if you’re still in the house. One folder, physical or digital, and every invoice goes in it.

What Records Do You Need to Prove Home Sale Deductions?

Your basis records need to outlive your ownership of the house. The sale year is when they matter, and that can be decades after the money has been spent.

Publication 523 includes a section on what records to keep, short enough to read in one sitting. Hold everything until the period for amending or examining that return has closed.

Start with both closing statements. The one from when you bought the property establishes your original cost. The one from when you sell establishes your proceeds and selling expenses.

Contractor invoices, paid receipts, and canceled checks document improvements. Credit card statements help, though a statement line reading “home center, $2,840” proves less than an itemized invoice describing a new furnace.

Form 1099-S is the document that the IRS gets. If you received one, box 1 shows your date of sale, and the IRS matches that against your return.

Anyone who rents the property out needs to track depreciation schedules closely. Without them, you’re reconstructing years of deductions from memory at the worst possible time.

Permits, inspection reports, and insurance claim files round out the picture. An estate selling a parent’s home should also keep the date-of-death valuation or appraisal, since that number sets the heirs’ basis.

Digital copies are fine and smarter than paper. Scan the folder, put it in cloud storage, and email a copy to yourself so it survives a house fire or a flooded basement near the Yellowstone.

One more layer applies if you ever rented the property out. Keep each depreciation schedule with the rest of the file, not buried in an old return you’d have to dig out later. A landlord’s cost figures move every twelve months, and rebuilding that history from memory is the fastest way to overstate a gain you never had, then pay tax on it. Owners who never rented can skip the whole exercise. The same habit still earns its keep at the table, though, because a title company reading the statements will ask a seller for paper nobody thought to save. Your home file answers that in a minute.

Name the files so a stranger could sort them, because someday one might have to. Year, then what it is: the closing when you bought, the roof, the furnace, and the basement finish. An executor going through your files will thank you, and so will you when a preparer asks about work you did two houses ago.

Technical updates to these rules get published by the IRS in the Internal Revenue Bulletin, where revenue procedures and similar guidance appear. Your preparer watches the I.R.B. so you don’t have to, and that’s part of what you’re paying for.

One pattern I keep running into: families clearing out a deceased parent’s house throw away the very box that would have supported the basis. Sort the filing cabinet before the dumpster arrives, not after.

How Do You Report a Home Sale to the IRS?

A seller called me in March, certain she owed tax on a house she’d sold in the fall, because a 1099-S showed up in her mailbox. Her gain came in under the exclusion. She reported the sale and owed nothing.

Reporting and owing aren’t the same act. Report the sale of a main home on your federal income tax return if there’s a taxable gain, or if a Form 1099-S came even with no taxable gain. Reporting a gain that’s eligible for exclusion is also your choice to make.

You enter transaction details on Form 8949 and carry totals to Schedule D with your other capital gains and losses. Software handles the mechanics if you feed it accurate numbers.

Publication 523 provides three worksheets that do the heavy lifting. Worksheet 1 builds your adjusted basis and feeds Worksheet 2, which produces your taxable gain and any depreciation to recapture as ordinary income. Worksheet 3 calculates your maximum exclusion and carries it back into Worksheet 2.

Excluded gain gets shown and then subtracted, using a code on Form 8949 rather than simply omitting the sale. Leave it off completely when a 1099-S was filed, and a matching notice tends to show up a year or two later.

Montana filers start from the federal numbers and then apply state treatment on Form 2. Volume matters for context: Redfin counted 503 Billings homes sold in July 2026, down from 550 in the same month a year earlier. That’s a lot of returns carrying a home sale into the next filing season.

Estates and trusts report through Form 1041 instead, and the beneficiaries receive a K-1. Executors handling this alone should price out an hour with a CPA against the cost of an amended fiduciary return.

Timing catches people. A December closing lands on that year’s return even if the money didn’t move until the following week, and a January closing pushes everything a full year out.

If a sale sits close to the turn of the year and you have any say in the closing date, mention it to your preparer before agreeing to one. Sometimes the year makes no difference at all. Sometimes it changes which income year the gain lands in, and that matters for a household with an unusual spike in income.

A tax refund won’t be delayed by a home sale. Reported correctly, an excluded sale rarely slows anything down.

How Do You Access Your Tax Information with an IRS Account?

Want to see your tax history before you sell? Setting up an IRS online account is the single most useful hour a homeowner can spend before a sale closes.

The individual online account lets you check your balance, make and review payments, set up or view payment plans, manage communication preferences, access some tax records, and approve authorization requests. Registration runs through ID.me and takes a photo ID plus a phone number.

Once you’re signed in, the Tax Records page holds the link to transcripts. The IRS explains the whole process on its Get Your Tax Records and Transcripts page.

Availability varies by transcript type. Tax return and record of account transcripts cover the current year plus three prior years through the online account. Tax account transcripts generally reach back through the current year and nine prior years.

Why does a homebuyer care about any of this? Because sellers with back taxes, unfiled returns, or a federal lien need to know it before the title company finds out. A lien doesn’t kill a sale. Discovering one three days before closing can.

Handled early, a lien is usually just another payoff line on the settlement statement, same as a mortgage. Handled late, it’s a delayed closing, with everyone waiting on paperwork from an agency that doesn’t care about your moving truck. If you suspect something’s outstanding, look before you list.

Free help exists, and it’s underused. VITA sites prepare returns at no charge for filers generally making $69,000 or less, people with disabilities, and taxpayers with limited English. TCE sites serve taxpayers 60 and older, focusing on pension and retirement issues. The Taxpayer Advocate Service explains both programs in its filing season assistance guide.

An heir in Laurel reached me on a Wednesday last year with five weeks to be out of his late father’s house before a job transfer to North Dakota. The place still had a jet boat on a trailer in the garage and a workshop full of hand tools, the kind of leftover stuff I see in almost every one of these calls. He took the offer, kept the boat, and left the rest. We closed before his start date, and he handled the tax filing later from three states away with a folder he’d scanned on his phone.

That’s the kind of timeline where selling directly earns its keep. When the clock is the constraint rather than the price, a buyer who can close on your date changes what’s possible. It’s the reason we buy houses in any condition, so the date on the calendar stays yours rather than a lender’s. Sellers who need cash home buyers in Red Lodge get the same terms.

Weighing a sale and stuck on the tax side? Maybe the house needs more work than you want to fund. Either way, we’re glad to talk it through and point you toward the right professional for the return itself. Call or reach out through Billings Homebuyers whenever you’re ready, and if the timing isn’t right, that’s a perfectly good answer too.