To find your Roth IRA contributions, start with Form 5498 from your account’s custodian: it is the official yearly record of what you put in. You can get it three ways — through your brokerage or bank’s online tax center, from the paper copy the custodian mails you, or by pulling an IRS Wage and Income Transcript that shows every Form 5498 filed under your Social Security number. Together these cover roughly the last ten years of contribution history. For anything older, you fall back on your own tax returns, bank statements, and any Form 5498 copies you saved.
Why This Number Matters
Roth IRA contributions are made with after-tax dollars, so you can generally pull your original contributions back out at any age without owing income tax or the 10% early-withdrawal penalty.1Internal Revenue Service. Roth IRAs That freedom only applies to the contribution portion of your balance, not to earnings or converted amounts.
Federal law sets a specific ordering for Roth withdrawals: every dollar you take out comes first from regular contributions, then from conversions (oldest first), and finally from earnings.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 408A – Roth IRAs The rule is favorable, but it only helps if you can prove your contribution total. If you cannot, the IRS may treat part of a withdrawal as earnings and tax it, and possibly penalize it.
The IRS does not keep a running tally of your Roth basis for you. Substantiating your contributions is your job.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S. Code 7491 – Burden of Proof That is why the question of where to look comes up — usually years or decades in, after custodians have changed and old logins have gone stale.
Form 5498 from Your Custodian
Every year, your Roth IRA custodian files a Form 5498 with the IRS reporting what you contributed, and sends you a copy.4Internal Revenue Service. Form 5498 – Asset Information Reporting Codes and Common Errors The number you want is in Box 10, labeled “Roth IRA contributions.” That figure is the after-tax dollars you added for the tax year printed on the form. Rollovers from 529 plans are also captured in Box 10, so a combined figure can appear if you did both in the same year.5Internal Revenue Service. Form 5498 IRA Contribution Information Add up Box 10 across every year you have contributed and you have your lifetime basis.
Form 5498 does not arrive in January with your W-2s and 1099s. Because contributions for a tax year can be made up to the April filing deadline, custodians have until June 1 of the following year to file the form and send you your copy.6Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2025) For the 2025 tax year, that means June 1, 2026. Waiting until early summer catches the deposits you made during the January-to-April grace window.
A quick sanity check while you have the form open: for 2026, the maximum Roth IRA contribution is $7,500, or $8,600 if you are 50 or older, with the ability to contribute phasing out between $153,000 and $168,000 for single filers and between $242,000 and $252,000 for married couples filing jointly.7Internal Revenue Service. 401(k) Limit Increases to $24,500 for 2026, IRA Limit Increases to $7,500 If Box 10 shows more than you were eligible to contribute, you may be looking at an excess contribution rather than usable basis.
Your Brokerage or Bank Portal
Logging in to the institution that holds the account is usually the fastest route. Most custodians file Form 5498 copies under a section called “Tax Center,” “Tax Documents,” or “Account Statements,” and you can pull several prior years at once.
The portal also has a transaction history or activity log that shows individual deposits. Read the labels carefully. A direct contribution designated to a specific tax year looks different from a transfer between accounts or a rollover from another IRA. Many portals let you filter by contribution year rather than calendar year, which matters because a deposit made in February or March may have been designated for the prior tax year.8Internal Revenue Service. Traditional and Roth IRAs
Closed an account, or switched firms? Brokerages are required to keep client account records for at least six years after an account closes. You may not have portal access anymore, but a call to the old firm’s records department can usually produce copies.
IRS Wage and Income Transcripts
When a custodian has shut down, merged, or is otherwise out of reach, the IRS is your backup. Because every Form 5498 is filed with the agency under your Social Security number, the IRS holds its own copy.
Sign in to your Individual Online Account on the IRS website. First-time users verify identity through ID.me, which involves uploading a government photo ID and either a facial recognition scan or a short video call.9Internal Revenue Service. New Identity Verification Process to Access Certain IRS Online Tools and Services Once you are in, request the Wage and Income Transcript, which compiles every information return filed under your name, including W-2s, 1099s, and Form 5498s.10Internal Revenue Service. Transcript Types for Individuals and Ways to Order Them Scroll to the section headed “Form 5498 Information.” Each entry lists the custodian’s name and the reported contribution amount for that year.
The online system covers the current processing year and nine prior tax years, roughly a ten-year window.10Internal Revenue Service. Transcript Types for Individuals and Ways to Order Them If you cannot use the online tool, call 1-800-908-9946 to order transcripts by phone, or use “Get Transcript by Mail” on the IRS site.11Internal Revenue Service. Get Your Tax Records and Transcripts
Contributions Older Than Ten Years
Anything older than that ten-year window will not appear in the online transcript. Form 4506 (Request for Copy of Tax Return) can get you an actual copy of a prior return, but the IRS generally only keeps Form 1040 copies for about seven years before destroying them. The fee is $30 per return and processing takes up to 75 calendar days.12Internal Revenue Service. Request for Copy of Tax Return For contributions from that far back, your own records — saved Form 5498 copies, old tax returns, and bank statements showing transfers into the IRA — become the primary evidence.
Your Own Tax Returns
Your prior-year returns can help fill gaps, though the information is not always where you would expect. Roth contributions do not appear on Form 1040 itself, because they are not deductible and do not reduce taxable income.13Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 451, Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs) Two places in the return paperwork are worth checking.
The first is Form 8606 (Nondeductible IRAs), which tracks basis and reports conversions and certain distributions. You are required to file it in any year you convert money from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA or take a non-qualified distribution from a Roth IRA. You are not required to file Form 8606 just to report regular Roth contributions.14Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 8606 (2025) So it will not exist for every year you contributed, but where it does exist, it contains figures that help reconstruct what was in the account and where it came from. If nondeductible contributions were never tracked properly, the IRS may treat the full distribution as taxable when you eventually withdraw.15Internal Revenue Service. Publication 590-A (2025), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs)
The second is your tax software’s supplemental worksheets. Programs like TurboTax and H&R Block often generate an internal “Roth Basis” or “Roth IRA Contribution Summary” worksheet behind the scenes, even though nothing about it prints on Form 1040. If you still have prior-year return files, open them and look for those attached worksheets.
If Something on Form 5498 Looks Wrong
Custodians occasionally report a contribution in the wrong box, assign it to the wrong tax year, or list the wrong dollar amount. If you spot an error, contact the custodian and ask for a corrected form. The IRS requires custodians to file a corrected Form 5498 as soon as they become aware of a mistake.6Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 (2025) Save both the original and the corrected version.
One error to watch for is a contribution categorized as a rollover (Box 2) rather than as a regular Roth contribution (Box 10). Rollovers do not count toward your annual contribution limit or your withdrawable basis the same way regular contributions do, so the distinction matters for later tax math.
A separate boundary worth naming: if Box 10 shows an amount larger than you were allowed to contribute for that year, that excess is not part of your basis. Excess contributions left in the account past the tax-filing deadline (including extensions) are hit with a 6% penalty for each year they remain.16Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – IRA Contribution Limits Correcting an excess is a different process from simply looking up contributions, but treating an excess as basis is a common way people overstate their withdrawable amount.
How Long to Keep the Paperwork
The IRS recommends keeping retirement account records until all benefits have been distributed and enough time has passed to rule out an audit.17Internal Revenue Service. Maintaining Your Retirement Plan Records For a Roth IRA, that means holding on to every Form 5498, every Form 8606, and any supporting statements for as long as the account exists, plus at least three years after your final distribution. Roth IRAs have no required minimum distributions during the owner’s lifetime, so that horizon can run decades.
A workable habit: save a digital copy of each year’s Form 5498 as it arrives in late spring, and keep a simple spreadsheet with the year, the amount, and the custodian. When the question comes up years from now, either from you or from the IRS, that spreadsheet backed by the original forms is exactly what proves your basis.