Schedule FA for Interactive Brokers, step by step
July 2026 · 8 min read
Schedule FA is where most Interactive Brokers investors get stuck: the form wants numbers that appear on no IBKR statement — per-lot initial values, a peak value computed in rupees, the account's opening date — and it wants them for the calendar year, a period IBKR will never send you unprompted. Here is the full path from an IBKR account to a filled Schedule FA.
First: calendar year, not financial year
Schedule FA reports foreign assets held at any time during the calendar year ending within the financial year — for AY 2026-27, that is January to December 2025. If you hand your CA an April–March statement for Schedule FA, every number will be subtly wrong. You need a second export, cut for January–December.
What Table A3 wants for every holding
Table A3 ("equity and debt interest held in any entity") asks for, per holding:
- Country and the entity's name and address (the company you hold shares in);
- Date of acquiring the interest — a property of each lot, which is why the safe granularity is one row per lot, not per symbol;
- Initial value of the investment — what the lot cost, in INR at the acquisition date's rate;
- Peak value of the investment during the period — the highest INR value during the calendar year, which requires daily prices and daily exchange rates (see how peak value is actually computed);
- Closing value on December 31;
- Total gross amount credited (dividends — at gross, before US withholding); and
- Total gross proceeds from any sale during the year.
A holding you sold mid-year still gets its row — with a closing value of zero and its sale proceeds filled in.
Table A2: the account itself
The IBKR account is a custodial account in Table A2, separate from the stocks inside it: institution name and address, your account number, the date the account was opened, the peak balance during the year, the closing balance, and the gross amounts credited. The peak and closing figures here are about the account's cash, which means reconstructing the daily cash balance from every deposit, dividend, trade settlement and interest credit through the year.
Why A2 and not A1? Schedule FA splits foreign accounts into Table A1 (depository accounts — foreign bank or deposit accounts) and Table A2 (custodial accounts, where a custodian holds your securities). A brokerage account is a custodial account, so IBKR goes in A2, and the idle cash inside it is part of that same account rather than a separate A1 depository row. That said, the depository-versus-custodian line is genuinely debatable at the edges: a broker offering real bank-like features — an interest-bearing cash sweep, a debit card — could arguably touch A1 as well, and some practitioners take a more cautious view. For a plain IBKR investing account, custodial → A2 is the mainstream, defensible treatment, but if your setup is unusual it is a judgment call worth raising with your CA.
Getting the data out of IBKR
The default annual activity statement doesn't carry what the tables above need — most critically, the acquisition date of every lot you still hold and the account's opening date. The right export is a Flex Query, IBKR's build-your-own report, which can produce lot-level open positions, full cash transaction history, and account metadata for any date range. Why the difference matters is covered in Flex Query vs activity statement; the exact template to build is in our Flex Query guide.
The five computations between the export and the form
- Initial value: each lot's cost basis, converted at the SBI TT buying rate for its acquisition date.
- Peak value: for each lot, price × quantity × that day's rate, every trading day of the year — take the maximum of the INR series, not the USD one.
- Closing value: December 31 position value at the year-end rate.
- Income credited: gross dividends per holding, converted under the Rule 115 convention.
- A2 cash reconstruction: replay the year's cash events to find the peak and closing balances, and reconcile the result against IBKR's own ending-cash figure so you know nothing was missed.
How dividends get split across lots
A3's "gross amount paid/credited" is a per-holding figure, and a holding is a lot — so a dividend has to be attributed to the right lots, not smeared across all of them. The rule that keeps this honest: a dividend belongs only to the lots you actually held on its payment date, split in proportion to their share counts. A lot you bought after a dividend paid earns nothing from it; a lot you'd already sold earns nothing either.
This matters most for anyone accumulating a position — RSUs, or repeated buys of the same stock. If you instead copied a symbol's whole-year dividend total onto every lot row, then summed the rows (as a CA or the ITR utility might), the total would balloon by roughly the number of lots. Payment-date attribution avoids that: sum the per-lot figures back up and you get the symbol's true dividend for the year, exactly.
The mistakes that actually get made
- Using financial-year data for a calendar-year schedule;
- One row per symbol with a made-up single acquisition date;
- Peak value taken as the December 31 value, or as cost;
- Dividends reported net of US withholding instead of gross;
- Forgetting Table A2 entirely, or its opening date;
- Dropping holdings that were fully sold before December 31.
Why the effort is worth it: Schedule FA errors sit under the Black Money Act — up to ₹10 lakh per year of non-disclosure, independent of tax owed. It is the one schedule where "roughly right" is not a safe place to stop.
Frequently asked questions
Do I report one row per stock or one row per lot in Table A3?
The safe granularity is one row per lot — per acquisition date. Table A3 asks for the date of acquiring the interest and the initial value of the investment, and those are properties of a lot, not of a symbol. If you bought Apple three times, that is three rows with three dates, three initial values and three peak values.
Which calendar year do I report for AY 2026-27?
Calendar year 2025 (January to December 2025). Schedule FA runs on the calendar year ending within the relevant financial year, so for the return covering FY 2025-26 you disclose foreign assets held at any time during calendar 2025.
Does the IBKR account itself go into Schedule FA, or just the stocks?
Both. The equity holdings go into Table A3, and the brokerage account itself is reported as a custodial account in Table A2 — with its account number, opening date, peak balance and closing balance for the calendar year.
My account made a loss. Do I still fill Schedule FA?
Yes. Schedule FA is disclosure, not tax computation — profit and loss are irrelevant to the obligation. Anything held at any time during the calendar year gets reported.
Does the IBKR account go in Table A1 or Table A2 of Schedule FA?
Table A2. Table A1 is for foreign depository accounts (bank-type deposit accounts); Table A2 is for custodial accounts, where a custodian holds your securities — which is what a brokerage account is. The cash in your IBKR account is part of that custodial account, not a separate A1 entry. This can be debatable for brokers with genuine bank-like features, but for a plain IBKR investing account, custodial → A2 is the mainstream treatment. Confirm with your CA if your setup is unusual.