Form 5498 Box by Box (2026): Box 5 Value, RMD and Dates

What Form 5498 is, and which one you are holding

Under 26 U.S.C. 408(i), the trustee of an individual retirement account must report contributions, distributions and other matters to the IRS and to the owner, and the owner's copy is due not later than January 31 of the following year. The IRS form that carries those reports is Form 5498, “IRA Contribution Information”. The copy sent to you is Copy B, footed “Form 5498 (keep for your records)”. The instructions allow one form per IRA plan: “if a participant has established more than one IRA plan with the same trustee, a separate Form 5498 must be filed for each plan.”

The part that confuses readers is the year. The form you hold now was issued in 2026 and describes 2025. The next one describes 2026 and has not reached you yet:

Source: IRS, Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2025) and (2026); Form 5498 (2025) and (2026). The 2026 instructions carry the date line Jun 17, 2026 and the 2026 form the footer “Created 6/12/26”; the IRS Form 5498 page, last reviewed May 14, 2026, lists no recent developments.

A trustee that already sent the value statement, and had no reportable contributions, need not send you another statement, but it “must file Form 5498 with the IRS by May 31, 2027”. That is why many custodians send one document in late January or early February that carries the value, the RMD flag and the boxes 15a and 15b entries, and nothing more in May.

Box by box: contributions, conversions and repayments

The 2026 Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 define every box. The first table covers what went into the account during 2026.

Source: IRS, Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2026), Specific Instructions for Form 5498. The account number is required when the trustee files more than one Form 5498 for you.

Box by box: the value, the RMD flag and hard-to-value assets

Source: IRS, Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2026); Form 5498 (2026), Instructions for Participant.

The eight codes of box 15b, as the instructions list them:

Source: IRS, Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2026), Box 15b.

Which code a non-traded REIT or an interval fund share gets is the trustee's call under these definitions. A share of a corporation with no exchange market reads like code A and a trust or partnership interest like code E (our reading). Ask your custodian which code it used and why.

Box 5: where the number comes from

The regulation makes this box matter. For an IRA, “the account balance of the IRA as of December 31 of the calendar year preceding the calendar year for which distributions are required to be made” is used to compute the RMD (26 CFR 1.408-8(b)(2)), and Publication 590-B (2025) says the IRA account balance is the amount in the IRA at the end of the year before the year for which the RMD is figured. The 2026 box 5 value therefore sets the 2027 RMD. Our full guide is required minimum distributions from IRAs holding illiquid assets.

Three further rules, all from the 2026 instructions, decide what you see in the box:

• Inherited IRAs. On the decedent's form the trustee enters the date-of-death value, or uses an alternate method that reports the year-end value, which “will usually be zero”, and the heir's form shows the heir's share at year end. The decedent's name must appear on the beneficiary's form: “the decedent's name must be shown on the beneficiary's Form 5498 and annual statement”. How the 10-year clock works is in the inherited IRA guide.
• A fully emptied IRA. If a total distribution was made and no contributions, rollovers or conversions were made that year, the trustee “need not file Form 5498 or furnish the annual statement to reflect that the FMV on December 31 was zero”.
• A closed or revoked IRA still gets a form for the contributions it received.

Other IRS documents tie the same figure to other forms. The instructions for Form 8606 (2025) tell you to enter on line 6 “the total value of all your traditional IRAs as of December 31, 2025, plus any outstanding rollovers” and add that a statement should reach you by January 31 showing each IRA's value on December 31. Publication 590-A (2025) has a record column headed “Fair market value of IRA as of December 31, 2025, from Form 5498”. If you do a backdoor Roth conversion, the pro-rata math in our backdoor Roth guide starts from this box.

How often the hard-to-value boxes are empty

Boxes 15a and 15b have been required since tax year 2015, when the IRS began asking custodians for selected information on unconventional assets. The GAO's January 2020 report on tax year 2016 is the last public count we found:

Source: GAO-20-210, Individual Retirement Accounts (January 2020), Table 3 and footnotes 24 and 32.

The GAO also found that Publications 590-A and 590-B and the custodian-form instructions did not explain how to determine the FMV of such assets; we found no valuation method in the 2025 publications or the 2026 instructions we saved (our reading). It added that for some of these assets owners “may need to supply custodians with independent appraisals or other evidence to substantiate an asset’s current FMV”. For a holder, a stale or high figure in box 15a raises the RMD for a whole year (our reading of 1.408-8(b)(2)). For self-directed accounts, our self-directed IRA real estate guide covers the custodian side and the custodian comparison lists who offers what.

The IRS data behind box 5: $14.58 trillion in tax year 2023

The IRS Statistics of Income Division publishes an Individual Retirement Arrangements Study that matches Forms 1040, 1099-R and 5498. It is the only public count we found of what the box 5 values add up to; the June 2026 release covers tax years 2022 and 2023. All figures are sample estimates.

Source: IRS Statistics of Income, Individual Retirement Arrangements Study (June 2026), Table 1, tax years 2022 and 2023. A taxpayer can hold more than one type, so the types do not add to the total.

Money moves into these accounts through the boxes covered above. In tax year 2023 the study counts 17,702,756 taxpayers with contributions totaling $89.11 billion (boxes 1, 8, 9 and 10), 5,857,558 with rollovers totaling $682.42 billion (box 2) and 1,597,798 with Roth conversions totaling $36.65 billion (box 3). For 2022 the Roth conversion figures were 1,466,826 taxpayers and $36.49 billion.

By age, the value sits with the people closest to RMDs:

Source: IRS Statistics of Income, Individual Retirement Arrangements Study (June 2026), Table 4, tax year 2023. We added the IRS age bands under 20 through 35 under 40 into one row, 40 under 45 and 45 under 50 into another, and 50 under 55 and 55 under 60 into a third (our arithmetic).

Taxpayers aged 70 and over, the group with RMDs, were 15,925,617 of the 71,058,598 and held $5,703.66 billion, or 39.1% of the value, an average of $358,143 each; taxpayers aged 60 and over held 74.9% (our arithmetic). Every one of those dollars passes through a box 5.

Boxes 11, 12a and 12b: the RMD notice

Each year the trustee must tell you, for each IRA it held on December 31, whether an RMD is due. The instructions allow two methods. Alternative one states the RMD amount and the date it must be taken, and the trustee may compute it “assuming the sole beneficiary of the IRA is not a spouse more than 10 years younger than the participant”. Alternative two says an RMD is required, gives the date and offers to calculate the amount if you ask. The statement is due by January 31 and “can be provided in conjunction with the statement of the FMV”. Boxes 12a and 12b are one place to put the same information, but the trustee may use a separate statement instead.

Box 11 follows the age rule. The instructions say the trustee must check it for the year the participant reaches age 73 (73rd birthdays after December 31, 2022 and before January 1, 2033), even though that first RMD can wait until April 1 of the next year; that is the window in 26 U.S.C. 401(a)(9)(C)(v)(I), and clause (II) sets 75 as the applicable age for a person who attains age 74 after December 31, 2032. The RMD itself is your job: the IRS RMD FAQ says “the account owner is ultimately responsible for taking the correct RMD amount”. The RMD for 2027 must be taken by December 31, 2027 (Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2026)).

Dates that matter

For the wider calendar of tax dates for these investors, see the year-end tax calendar for non-traded REIT and BDC investors.

When the form and your records disagree

The form is the trustee's report. Where a box does not match what you did or what you hold, the order of checks below is ours; the rules are from the 2026 instructions unless stated.

A worked example (our arithmetic). An owner who turns 75 in 2027 has a traditional IRA with $320,000 of fund shares and $180,000 of rental real estate held through an LLC, and the custodian reports a box 5 value of $500,000 with $180,000 in box 15a under code D. Publication 590-B (2025), Table III, gives a divisor of 24.6 at age 75 (the IRS has not posted a later edition, so we assume the table is unchanged), so the RMD is $500,000 / 24.6 = $20,325.20. If the real estate was worth $130,000 at the same date and the custodian corrected box 15a, box 5 would be $450,000 and the RMD $18,292.68. A $50,000 error in box 5 moves the next RMD by $2,032.52, and every $100,000 of reported value adds $4,065.04.

What a reader can do with this

• Find the right form. The form received in 2026 shows the December 31, 2025 value and the 2026 RMD flag; the 2026 values arrive by February 1, 2027.
• Compare box 5 with your own records in January. Use the fund's December 31 value for a fund holding, and for property or an LLC the latest appraisal or statement you can document, then ask the custodian about any gap before the RMD is computed.
• Ask which code the custodian used in box 15b for each non-traded holding, and keep the answer with your records.
• Match boxes to your return. Box 3 and the conversion on your return, box 5 and line 6 of Form 8606 if you file one, boxes 1 and 10 and your contributions. Keep your Forms 5498 and 8606, as the Instructions for Form 8606 (2025) advise.
• Do not wait for box 11. If you are at or past the applicable age, compute the RMD from last December's value. The RMD options for illiquid funds are in our RMD guide, the conversion side in the Roth conversion guide and charitable transfers in the QCD guide.
• Watch property held through an IRA LLC. Rental income and debt can create unrelated business income, covered in the Form 990-T guide.

FAQ

Related IRA forms: Form 1099-R box 7 codes · Form 8606 line by line.

Sources, read and saved on October 23, 2026: IRS Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2026, dated Jun 17, 2026) and (2025); IRS Form 5498 (2026) and (2025); IRS Form 5498 information page (reviewed May 14, 2026); Instructions for Form 8606 (2025) and Form 8606 (2025); IRS Publications 590-A (2025) and 590-B (2025); IRS RMD FAQs (reviewed January 29, 2026); 26 U.S.C. 401 and 408 and 26 CFR 1.408-5 and 1.408-8 (Cornell Legal Information Institute); GAO-20-210, Individual Retirement Accounts (January 2020); IRS Statistics of Income, Individual Retirement Arrangements Study, Tables 1 and 4 for tax years 2022 and 2023 (June 2026). This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.