Which futures records should I keep for a future tax report?

01What to save, in one list

Everything below is something the exchange already records for you. You are not building anything new — you are downloading it before it scrolls out of reach. Save the original files the exchange generates, not a summary you typed yourself, because a later question will almost always be about a specific line, not a total.

Here is what a quiet month actually looks like, with illustrative numbers. Say in March you bought 200 USDT with your card, moved 100 of it to the futures wallet, opened and closed two small trades, paid about 0.25 USDT of fees on each one, received a small funding payment overnight, and withdrew 180 USDT in April. That is six records in total, and the exchange already has all six — you just download them. Multiply that by a year of occasional trading and you can see why it is easier to export every few months than to go looking later.

• Trade history for each contract: every time part of your order was actually executed (a fill), with the date and time, whether you were long or short, how much, at what price and the fee charged on it.
• Funding payments you paid and received while positions were open.
• Closed position and realized result records, including positions closed by liquidation or by automatic settlement.
• Deposits and withdrawals: amount, coin, network, address and the transaction ID on the blockchain.
• Transfers between your own wallets inside the account — spot, funding and futures.
• Conversions and swaps, for example USDT to USDC, with both sides of the amount.
• How you got the stablecoin in the first place: card receipt, bank transfer confirmation or P2P order record.
• Whatever account statement the exchange can generate for the period.

02Trades, fees, funding and conversions

A futures result is made of more than the price difference. Fees are charged on each execution — entry and exit separately — and on Bybit they come out of your account balance and appear in your trading history, rather than being taken out of the order's margin. Not every fee is paid in USDT: if you ever trade a contract that settles in bitcoin instead, the fee is taken in bitcoin, so your file will show amounts in coins — worth a note when you save it.

Funding is a separate flow again: on perpetual contracts it moves between longs and shorts, so sometimes money leaves your balance and sometimes it arrives, with no trade on your part. If you are not sure what those entries are, the page on what funding is and when you pay it explains the mechanism. For your records all that matters is keeping each payment with its timestamp and amount.

Then there are the closes you never clicked. Some contracts have an expiry date and close themselves on that day, even if you are asleep — and a small settlement fee can be charged. If you trade one, check its fee in the contract details; the difference between perpetual and dated contracts takes a minute to read. Liquidations show up the same way, as a close you did not place. Those lines go in your files exactly as the exchange shows them.

Conversions deserve their own folder. Swapping one stablecoin for another, or converting a coin to USDT before trading, is a separate event from the futures trade that follows, and the two are easy to mix up months later. The page on what swapping USDT to USDC can cost covers the money side; here, just save the record of both amounts.

03Dates, time zones and money moving between your own wallets

Two things cause most of the confusion when someone opens their files a year later. The first is time: a file may be stamped in UTC or in the display time zone you had set when you exported it, and an entry near midnight can land in a different day depending on which one it is. Check the column header in the file, and write a one-line note in the same folder saying which time zone the export used.

The second is movement between your own wallets. Sending USDT from your spot wallet to your futures wallet is not income and not a trade — it is your own money moving from one part of your account to another. The same goes for sending coins from an exchange to your own wallet, which is covered separately in the guide to withdrawing profit from futures. Keep those records anyway, with the transaction ID for anything that travelled on a blockchain, because that is how a gap between "money left here" and "money arrived there" gets explained without guesswork.

If you ever try a second platform, keep one folder per exchange per year rather than merging everything into a single file. Our note on keeping records across two exchanges goes into that setup.

04How often to export, and the limits that catch people out

Exchanges do not keep an unlimited history on tap, and the export tools have their own rules. On Bybit, for example, exporting account data works on the website and not in the app. The statement for your main account is built from Account → Account Statement; it covers your trading and funding balances, but not Earn or other separate products, so if you use those, export them on their own. The file takes about a working day to appear, and the download link stays valid for seven days. There is also a tick box to include your verified legal name, since by default a statement shows only your Bybit UID.

The transaction log is the other half of the picture: changes to your account balance together with your deposits and withdrawals. On Bybit one export file can cover at most a year, and roughly three years back is as far as you can reach. Yesterday's activity shows up the next day, so there is no point exporting the same evening. The rest of the limits are written on the export page itself — worth a look before you need them.

Here's the catch: your futures trades are not inside that statement. You download them from the futures history screen itself, which has its own export button. If you only save the account statement, you save everything except the trades.

1. Pick a fixed day

   The first weekend of each quarter works well. Four short sessions a year beats one panicked search.

2. Export the statement and the transaction log

   One file per period, staying inside the allowed range. Generating can take a day or more, so do not start this on a deadline.

3. Export the futures trade history separately

   Open the history screen for your futures trades and export from there. Do not assume the account statement already contains them.

4. Add the money-in and money-out records

   Deposits, withdrawals, conversions and any purchase of USDT with local currency, with transaction IDs where they exist.

5. Store the originals

   A folder per year per exchange, files kept in their original format, backed up in one more place. Add your one-line note about the time zone.

05What to ask a tax professional in your own country

We deliberately do not publish rates or rules here: how futures results are treated varies from country to country, and the honest answer for your situation comes from someone who works with your local rules. What you can do is arrive with clean files and specific questions, which usually turns an expensive conversation into a short one.

Useful questions to bring: which currency should amounts be converted into, and at which exchange rate and on which date? Is each closed trade counted separately, or the period's net result? How are funding payments and trading fees treated? Do transfers between my own wallets need to be reported at all? What date applies — the trade, the settlement or the withdrawal? How many years of records should I keep, and in what form? If you are in India, our overview of how crypto futures are taxed there shows the kind of detail a local answer contains; the UK has its own page. Neither replaces advice about your own circumstances.

One last practical point: check what a platform can export before you deposit, not after. If you are still choosing, the comparison of exchanges for beginners covers the general picture, and the fastest way to judge the reporting side is to sign up on Bybit, check during sign-up whether futures are available where you live, and then look at the account statement and data export pages on the website before your first trade.