When Does Form 5498 Come Out and Why It’s Late?

For the 2025 tax year, your IRA custodian must send you the complete Form 5498 by June 1, 2026. The standard deadline is May 31, but it shifts to the next business day because May 31 falls on a Sunday.¹ An earlier statement covering your account’s year-end value and any required minimum distribution has to reach you sooner, by February 2, 2026. So the answer to when Form 5498 comes out is really two dates, and neither of them lands during tax filing season.

The Two Delivery Dates

Form 5498 reporting happens in two stages.

The first stage is due by January 31 each year, pushed to February 2, 2026 for the 2025 tax year because January 31 falls on a weekend. By that date, your custodian must send you a statement showing the fair market value of your IRA as of December 31, 2025, along with notice of whether you owe a required minimum distribution for 2026.¹

The second stage is the full Form 5498, due to you and to the IRS by June 1, 2026. That single deadline covers your copy and the IRS copy at the same time.¹ This is the version that reports your contributions, rollovers, Roth conversions, and recharacterizations for the year.

Compare that to a W-2 or a 1099-R, which typically shows up in late January or early February. Form 5498 arrives roughly four months later.

Why It Comes After You File

The late schedule exists because IRA contributions for a given tax year can be made after that year ends. For most people, contributions counted toward 2025 can be deposited as late as April 15, 2026.² Custodians need time after that cutoff to process last-minute deposits, reconcile their records, and produce accurate forms. If Form 5498 went out in January or February, it would routinely miss contributions that legally belong to the prior tax year.

One practical note about that January-to-April window: when you make a contribution during those months, tell your custodian which tax year it applies to. If you don’t specify, the custodian can treat it as a current-year contribution and report it to the IRS that way.²

You Don’t Need It to File Your Return

Because Form 5498 arrives after most people have filed, you are not expected to wait for it. You already know what you contributed during the year, and that’s what goes on your Form 1040. The form itself is marked “Info Copy Only,” meaning it’s a verification document rather than an input for your return.³

The IRS uses Form 5498 on its end to cross-check what your custodian reports against what you claimed. If you deducted $7,500 in traditional IRA contributions but the custodian only shows $5,000, expect a notice asking you to explain the difference or pay additional tax. That’s why the form is still worth reviewing when it shows up, even though your return has long since gone in.

What to Do When It Arrives

Compare every relevant box against your own records: regular contributions, rollovers, Roth conversions, recharacterizations, and the year-end fair market value. If anything doesn’t match, contact your custodian right away and ask them to review and correct the form. Custodians file corrected forms with the IRS, and they tend to move faster when the error is reported promptly.

Common problems include contributions attributed to the wrong tax year, incorrect rollover totals when a transfer crossed calendar years, and the wrong IRA type reported in Box 7. A misclassified account type is worth escalating to a tax advisor as well as the custodian, because it can affect how the IRS treats both your contributions and your withdrawals.

If you’re age 73 or older, Box 11 tells you whether an RMD is required for the following year. The earlier January statement should already have flagged this and either stated your RMD amount or offered to calculate it.⁴ Missing an RMD triggers a 25% excise tax on the shortfall, dropping to 10% if you correct it within two years.⁵

If you’re checking whether you went over the annual limit, the 2026 cap across all your traditional and Roth IRAs is $7,500, or $8,600 if you are 50 or older.⁶ Excess contributions are taxed at 6% for each year they remain in the account.⁷ Catching an overcontribution on Form 5498 gives you a chance to remove it before that penalty compounds.

If It Never Shows Up

Most custodians post Form 5498 to a secure online portal or app, usually under a “tax documents” or “tax center” heading, and digital delivery generally beats paper by a few days. If you’ve opted into electronic statements, check the account dashboard after June 1.

For a closed or transferred account, the original custodian is still generally required to file Form 5498 for any contributions, rollovers, or conversions that happened while the account was open. The exception: if the account was fully distributed and no contributions of any kind were made that year, no form is required.¹

If you can’t reach the custodian or never got the form, you can pull the data from the IRS directly by requesting a Wage and Income Transcript, which includes Form 5498 information. The fastest route is your IRS Individual Online Account, where transcripts can be viewed, printed, or downloaded immediately. You can also call 800-908-9946 or mail Form 4506-T; those methods typically take 5 to 10 calendar days. Wage and Income Transcripts are available for the current year and nine prior tax years.⁸

Special Timing for SEP IRAs

If you have a SEP IRA, the June 1 date still applies to the form itself, but the contributions on it may not track the tax year you expect. Employers can deposit SEP contributions up to the due date of their business tax return, including extensions, which for some entities can push the deposit into October of the following year.⁹

The IRS requires SEP contributions to be reported on the Form 5498 for the year they are actually deposited, not the tax year they are meant for.⁹ A 2025 SEP contribution deposited in September 2026 will appear on your 2026 Form 5498, not the 2025 one. If you’re reconciling SEP amounts against a particular tax year, that timing shift is the usual source of confusion.

1
Internal Revenue Service. 2025 Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498
2
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-A (2025), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
3
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 5498, IRA Contribution Information (Info Copy Only)
4
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-B (2025), Distributions from Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
5
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Plan and IRA Required Minimum Distributions FAQs
6
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – IRA Contribution Limits
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 4973 – Tax on Excess Contributions to Certain Tax-Favored Accounts and Annuities
8
Internal Revenue Service. Transcript Types for Individuals and Ways to Order Them
9
Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Plans FAQs Regarding SEPs