Which Interactive Brokers export do I need for Schedule FA?

A custom Activity Flex Query, not the default Activity Statement. Build it once under Performance & Reports then Flex Queries, include the Trades, Open Positions and Cash Transactions sections, set Format to CSV and Period to 1 January to 31 December. Crucially, set each section's Level of Detail: Trades must include Closed Lots and Open Positions must include Lot. Without those two settings IBKR leaves the acquisition date blank and Schedule FA cannot be built from the file.

Why is my IBKR export missing acquisition dates?

Because the Flex Query was run at Summary or Execution level of detail. IBKR only populates Open Date Time on Open Positions when the section's Level of Detail is Lot, and on Trades only for Closed Lot rows. The field still appears in the file, just empty. Re-run the query with those two Level of Detail boxes ticked.

How are non-dollar holdings converted for Schedule FA?

Each holding is converted at its own currency's SBI TT buying rate, not through the US dollar. A euro-denominated ETF uses SBI's EUR rate, a Hong Kong listing uses the HKD rate. Converting a euro figure at the dollar rate overstates or understates it by the whole cross-rate difference, with nothing on the face of the return to reveal the error.

Which country do I report for an Ireland-domiciled ETF bought in dollars?

Ireland. Schedule FA Table A3 asks for the country the entity is registered in, not where the share trades or which currency you paid in. Accenture and Medtronic are Irish companies listed on the NYSE, and most low-cost world ETFs are Irish or Luxembourgish. The ISIN identifies it: the first two characters are the country code, so IE00B4L5Y983 is Ireland even though it may settle in dollars.

Where do options and futures go in Schedule FA?

Table D, Details of any other Capital Asset held outside India. Table A3 is for equity and debt interest, and an option is neither. Table D asks for no peak balance and no closing value, only the date of acquisition, what you invested and the income derived. Note that for a resident, gains from futures and options are often treated as non-speculative business income filed in ITR-3, rather than capital gains in ITR-2 — confirm the treatment with your CA.

Is the Schedule FA peak value based on the share price or the rupee value?

The rupee value. Schedule FA asks for the peak value of the holding, and value is measured in rupees, so the peak is the highest rupee figure across the year rather than the highest foreign-currency price converted afterwards. Because the rupee moves independently of the share price, the two often fall on different days. It matters most for stable-price holdings such as short-duration bond ETFs, where the rupee's own movement is almost the entire story.

What is the closing balance date for an IBKR account in Schedule FA?

December 31. Schedule FA is reported for the calendar year, so Table A2 and A3 closing values use the 31 December figure, not 31 March. This catches people out every year because the rest of the return follows the Indian financial year.

Schedule FA from Interactive Brokers — Step-by-Step

Updated 5 August 2026 · For ROR Indian residents · AY 2026-27

Interactive Brokers is the hardest broker to file Schedule FA from, and not because the data is missing. It is because IBKR gives you a report builder rather than a report — and the one setting that decides whether your export is usable at all is buried three levels down.

The short version. Build an Activity Flex Query. Include Trades, Open Positions and Cash Transactions. Set Trades → Closed Lots and Open Positions → Lot. Without those two, your file has no acquisition dates and no Schedule FA can be built from it.

Watch: Schedule FA in 2 minutes — Interactive Brokers

1. Why IBKR is different from a stock-plan broker

If you hold RSUs through Fidelity NetBenefits or Charles Schwab, your account contains one company's shares, priced in dollars, administered by your employer. Almost every Schedule FA guide is written for that case.

An IBKR account breaks three of those assumptions at once:

Many securities, not one. You chose them, so there is no employer record to fall back on.
Many currencies. A euro ETF on Xetra and a US stock can sit side by side, and each converts to rupees at its own rate.
Many asset classes. Options, futures, bonds and forex live in the same account as your shares, and they do not all go in the same Schedule FA table.

There is also no employer stock-plan trust, so Table F does not apply to an IBKR account. That one is a relief rather than a complication.

2. Building the Flex Query

IBKR has no one-click "download my holdings" export. You build a Flex Query once, and it is reusable every year afterwards — about ten minutes of setup that you never repeat.

Log in to interactivebrokers.com
Performance & Reports → Flex Queries → Activity Flex Query → +
Add the Trades, Open Positions and Cash Transactions sections
Set each section's Level of Detail — see the next section, this is the step that matters
In each section tick: Symbol, ISIN, Asset Class, Currency, Listing Exchange, Date, Quantity, Proceeds, Cost Basis, Realized P/L and Open Date Time
Set Format to CSV and Period to 1 January – 31 December of the year you are filing for
Save, Run, download

The single CSV that comes out carries holdings, sales, dividends and cash interest together — there is nothing else to download.

3. The Level of Detail setting everyone misses

Schedule FA needs a date of acquisition for every holding. IBKR will give you one — but only if you ask correctly.

Open Positions → tick "Lot". At Summary level, IBKR emits the Open Date Time column but leaves every value blank.
Trades → tick "Closed Lots". An execution-level trade row has no acquisition date even when it closes a position; only the closed-lot rows carry one.

This is the single most common reason an IBKR export cannot be used. The file looks complete — the columns are all there — and every acquisition date in it is empty.

What a Summary-level export looks like (note the trailing empty field):

Symbol,ISIN,Quantity,CostBasisPrice,LevelOfDetail,OpenDateTime
VWCE,IE00BK5BQT80,1,142.78,SUMMARY,

The same query at Lot level:

Symbol,ISIN,Quantity,CostBasisPrice,LevelOfDetail,OpenDateTime
VWCE,IE00BK5BQT80,1,142.78,LOT,12/05/2024;11:17:45

Same query, same fields, one checkbox apart. If you have already downloaded a file and the dates are blank, you do not need a different report — tick those two boxes and run the same query again.

4. Which table each holding goes in

Table	What goes in it	Needs peak value?
A2	The IBKR account itself — one row-set, with peak and closing balance and the income credited	Yes
A3	Each equity holding, one row per lot	Yes
D	Options, futures, warrants — capital assets that are not equity or debt	No
F	Not applicable to IBKR — there is no stock-plan trust	—

Table A2 describes the account, A3 itemises the shares inside it. Both are required; they are not alternatives.

5. Multi-currency: one rate per currency

Rule 115 converts foreign income at the SBI telegraphic transfer buying rate for the currency the income is actually in. A euro holding uses SBI's EUR rate. A Hong Kong listing uses the HKD rate.

Converting everything through the dollar is a silent error: a euro figure billed at the USD rate is wrong by the whole cross-rate difference, and nothing on the face of the return shows it. If a currency has no SBI TTBR published at all, the honest answer is to report that holding separately with your CA rather than approximate it.

One more subtlety: the peak value Schedule FA asks for is the highest rupee value the holding reached. The rupee moves independently of the share price, so for a stable-NAV holding — a short-bond ETF, say — the peak is driven almost entirely by the exchange rate, not the price. More on Rule 115 →

6. The country is the issuer's, not the exchange's

Table A3 asks for the country where the company is registered. Not where the share trades, and not the currency you paid in. Three real examples from one account:

Holding	Country reported	Listed on	Currency
Accenture plc	Ireland	NYSE	USD
Endeavour Mining	Cayman Islands	Toronto	CAD
iShares Core MSCI World	Ireland	Xetra	EUR

All three differ across all three columns. The ISIN is what settles it — the first two characters are the country of registration, so IE00B4L5Y983 is Ireland whatever exchange or currency it traded in. That is why the Flex Query field list above includes ISIN.

Most low-cost world ETFs held by Indian investors are Irish or Luxembourgish, chosen deliberately to limit US estate-tax exposure. Reporting them as US holdings is a common and avoidable error.

7. Options and futures

Options and futures are foreign capital assets and carry the same disclosure obligation as shares — but they belong in Table D, not A3. An option is neither equity nor debt interest.

Table D is, helpfully, the easier table: it asks for no peak balance and no closing value, only the date of acquisition, the amount invested and the income derived. That matters, because an expired contract has no price history to compute a peak from.

The income treatment is a separate question. For a resident, gains from futures and options are often treated as non-speculative business income — which is filed in ITR-3, not as capital gains in ITR-2. The Schedule FA disclosure is the same either way, but which form you file and where the income is offered is a question for your CA.

8. Three files look similar — which one you have

IBKR can hand you three different CSV layouts, and they are easy to confuse. Check the first two columns of your file:

First line looks like	What you have	Usable?
`Statement,Header,...`	Default Activity Statement	Usable, but often lacks Open Date Time
`HEADER,TRNT,...`	Flex Query, several sections	Yes — this is the one
`ClientAccountID,Currency,...`	Flex Query, single section	Yes, but only covers that one section

All three are accepted. The thing that matters is not which layout you have, but whether OpenDateTime has values in it.

9. A worked example, in rupees

One euro holding, start to finish, so you can check the arithmetic against your own file. VWCE, an Ireland-domiciled world ETF, bought on Xetra:

ISIN	`IE00BK5BQT80` → country reported: Ireland (not Germany, not the US)
Acquired	12 May 2024 — cost €142.78
Initial value	€142.78 × SBI EUR TTBR on 12 May 2024
Peak value	Highest rupee value across the year — see below
Closing value	Units × 31 Dec price × SBI EUR TTBR on 31 Dec

Every rate here is the EUR TTBR. Using the USD rate — even correctly looked up — gives a figure that is wrong by the whole EUR/USD cross rate, and nothing on the return would show it.

Why the peak is a rupee number, not a price number

Schedule FA asks for the peak value, and value is measured in rupees. Since the rupee moves independently of the share price, the day your holding was worth the most in rupees is often not the day the price peaked.

This matters most for stable-NAV holdings. A short-duration bond ETF barely moves in price, so its rupee peak is driven almost entirely by the exchange rate — checking a sample of these across 2025, taking the price peak instead of the rupee peak understated the figure by up to 7%. For a volatile stock the two usually coincide; for a treasury ETF they rarely do.

10. Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
No holdings found in the file	Query has no Open Positions section, or it is at Summary level	Add the section, set Level of Detail to Lot
Holdings appear but sales are missing	Trades section is at Execution level	Tick Closed Lots under Trades
A holding shows a value of zero	No price could be retrieved — usually a company delisted or acquired mid-year	Enter its share price from your statement when prompted
A holding is missing entirely	Its currency has no SBI TTBR, or its exchange could not be priced	Check the notes on the review page — each exclusion is named
Country looks wrong	ISIN field was not included in the query	Add ISIN, or correct the country on the review page
Dates are seven months out	Ambiguous slash dates (12/05 is 12 May or 5 Dec)	Set the Flex Query date format to `yyyyMMdd`

One thing IBKR will not give you: your account opening date, which Table A2 asks for. It is on your first IBKR statement, or in Client Portal under Settings → Account Settings. Worth digging out once and keeping — you need it every year.

11. Common mistakes

Running the Flex Query at Summary level — no acquisition dates, unusable file.
Using 31 March as the closing date — Schedule FA follows the calendar year, so it is 31 December.
Converting everything at the USD rate — each currency has its own SBI TTBR.
Reporting an Irish ETF as a US holding — the ISIN, not the exchange, decides the country.
Leaving options out entirely — they are disclosable in Table D.
Skipping Table A2 — the account itself is disclosed separately from the holdings in it.
Assuming no income means no disclosure — Schedule FA is a disclosure obligation, not an income one. A holding that paid nothing is still reported.

Or let the tool do it. Upload your Flex Query CSV and get Table A2, A3 and D filled in — per-currency SBI TTBR conversion, issuer country from the ISIN, and a portal-ready ITR-2 JSON plus an Excel working copy.

SBI TTBR & Rule 115 →
Which rate applies on which date

Table A2 vs A3 →
The account and the holdings are both reported

Calendar year vs FY →
Why Schedule FA ends 31 December