Form 1099-K for Foreign Sellers
If you sell through Amazon, Etsy, eBay, or a payment app, you've probably heard of the 1099-K — and maybe panicked a little. Here's what the form actually is, the threshold that decides who gets one as of 2026, and why a form arriving (or not arriving) tells you less about your taxes than you'd think.
What a 1099-K actually is
A Form 1099-K is an information report. A marketplace or payment processor — the IRS calls these "third-party settlement organizations" — uses it to tell the IRS, "here is the total we passed through to this seller this year." That's the whole job. It is a summary of money that flowed through the platform to you, not a bill, not a calculation of profit, and not something you personally fill out. It's the platform reporting on you, and you receive a copy so you know what the IRS was told.
The 2026 federal threshold
This is the number everyone wants, and it has swung wildly in recent years, so here is where it landed. As of 2026, a US marketplace or payment app must send a 1099-K only when both of these are true for the year: your gross payments are more than $20,000 and you had more than 200 transactions. Both bars have to be cleared — a seller with $50,000 across 40 sales, or 500 sales adding up to $8,000, is under the threshold on one leg and shouldn't be issued a federal 1099-K.
Why the confusion? A 2021 law had lowered the trigger toward $600 with no transaction count, and a phased rollout was planned for 2024 and 2025. That was undone: legislation enacted in 2025 restored the older $20,000-and-200 threshold, and that is the federal rule in force for 2026. One caveat worth knowing: some US states set their own, lower thresholds, so a state copy can still appear even when no federal one would. When a figure like this has changed three times in three years, "as of 2026" matters — always confirm the current rule before you rely on it.
A form is not a tax bill
Here's the point that saves people the most worry: whether or not you receive a 1099-K has nothing to do with whether your income is taxable. The threshold decides who gets a form; it does not decide who owes tax. If you earn money selling goods or services, that income counts whether the platform reports it or not. So a 1099-K showing up doesn't create a new tax — it just means the IRS has a copy of a number you were always meant to account for. And no 1099-K arriving is not permission to skip reporting your sales.
There's a second trap in the number itself. A 1099-K reports gross payments — the total before the platform's fees, refunds, shipping, and any sales tax it collected are stripped out. That figure is almost always bigger than your real revenue, and much bigger than your profit. The gap is exactly why bookkeeping from day one matters: your own records are what turn that inflated gross number into the true profit you're actually taxed on.
Why foreign sellers often don't get one — but their LLC does
This is the part specific to non-resident sellers, and it hinges on the paperwork you filed when you signed up. If you sell as a foreign individual and gave the platform a W-8BEN declaring you're not a US person, the platform generally treats you as outside the US 1099-K system — so, in many cases, no 1099-K is issued to you at all. The 1099-K regime is built around US payees identified by a US taxpayer number.
Now change one thing: you sell through a US LLC instead. The moment the account is in a US company's name, with its US EIN, the platform sees a US payee — and the ordinary 1099-K rules apply to that company once it crosses the threshold. So the same person can go from "no 1099-K as a foreign individual" to "1099-K issued to my US LLC" simply by routing sales through the US entity. Neither outcome changes what you ultimately owe; it only changes which name the form lands on. And a US LLC comes with its own separate filing duties — notably the annual Form 5472 for foreign-owned companies — regardless of any 1099-K.
What to do either way
If a 1099-K arrives, don't just copy the gross figure onto a return — reconcile it against your own books so fees, refunds, and sales tax come out and only true income remains. If one doesn't arrive, report your sales anyway from your records. Either way, keep the platform's year-end reports, because they're the raw material a clean filing is built from. Sales tax is a completely separate question from this income reporting; our guide to sales tax vs income tax and our sales-tax nexus checker cover that side.
What we handle for you
We make sure your platform paperwork is right so the correct name receives (or doesn't receive) the form, reconcile any 1099-K back to your real numbers, and fold it into an accurate US return — the everyday work of our e-commerce & Amazon practice. For the wider picture on selling into the US from abroad, see our deep dive on US sales tax for foreign e-commerce sellers. Show us your marketplace statements and we'll tell you exactly what's reportable.