There’s a new player in the ongoing ticket resale drama: taxes.
Ticketing platforms will now have to report anyone who sold more than $600 in tickets to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Wall Street Journal reports, so the IRS can charge them taxes. This goes into effect for the 2023 tax season, with ticketing platforms required to report to the IRS by Jan. 31, 2024.
The tax requirement is based entirely on price, not the seller’s revenue — a marked shift from the previous standard in which ticketing platforms had to report sellers to the IRS if the seller made more than $20,000 in revenue and conducted over 200 transactions. The law change was initially supposed to go into effect last year before getting postponed by the IRS.
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The new law, which is part of the American Rescue Plan, comes during a year of blockbuster tours — most notably Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour — that brought the ticketing resale market under a microscope and into national conversation. Many fans demanded that the government take action against ticketing platforms and scalpers due to industry giant Ticketmaster’s malfunctions and sky-rocketing resale prices. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average price of a Swift ticket sold on StubHub was $1,095, well over the new threshold.
Sellers will only need to pay taxes if they made a profit off of the tickets, so the fan-to-fan resale market likely won’t be affected. But it will be up to the sellers to calculate their profit. Come the 2023 tax season, many will face new taxing chaos as the IRS anticipates 44 million sellers to be reported by ticketing platforms.
