Short-term vs. long-term gains explained

If you've opened the Annual Report and noticed the Short-Term G/L and Long-Term G/L cards along the top, you've already seen the split. It's the same split that drives the Term column on every row of the Sales table.

This article unpacks what each bucket means, how Gold Silver Ledger decides which one a sold item lands in, and why the distinction exists in the first place.

The Annual Report is Premium-only, so the short-term/long-term split only appears on Premium accounts. The rule itself, though, applies the moment you sell — the report just surfaces it.

A sold item is long-term if you held it for one year or more between the buy date and the sell date, and short-term if you held it for less. That's it.

The Days Held column on each row of the Sales table is the calendar difference between the buy date you entered on the original purchase and the sell date you entered on the sale.

The calculation is per item, not per transaction. If you sold five coins in one go and four of them were bought 14 months ago and one was bought last week, you'll see four long-term rows and one short-term row in the same sell transaction.

That's a deliberate consequence of how the app tracks each piece of bullion individually — see How cost basis is determined.

Short-term and long-term gains are treated differently for US tax purposes, and the two cards on the report are split so you can hand each bucket to your tax advisor without re-sorting.

In the most general terms — and skip ahead to the disclaimer below for the caveats — short-term gains are taxed as ordinary income at your marginal rate, while long-term gains on physical precious metals are treated as collectibles and capped at a 28% federal rate (lower if your ordinary-income rate is lower). Losses follow their own rules in each bucket.

The practical takeaway for most stackers is that holding a position into long-term territory before selling can change the tax treatment significantly. The report's job isn't to advise on that — it's to show clearly which side of the line each sold item fell on, so the conversation with a tax advisor starts from a clean ledger.

A few concrete scenarios, using the kinds of spot prices typical in mid-2026.

You buy a 1 oz American Gold Buffalo on Mar 1, 2026 at ~$4,700 spot with a $90 premium → cost basis $4,790. You sell it on Aug 1, 2026 for $4,900.

You buy a tube of 20 American Silver Eagles in Feb 2024 at $32/coin → cost basis $640 for the tube. You sell the tube in Apr 2026 at $80/coin → proceeds $1,600.

You buy a 1 oz platinum coin in Jan 2024 at $1,050 with a $40 premium → cost basis $1,090. You sell it in Mar 2026 for $1,020.

A loss in either bucket reduces that bucket's total. Green cards turn red when the bucket nets out negative for the year, as you'll see on any year where realized losses outweigh gains.

Physical precious metals occupy a slightly unusual corner of the US tax code. They're not stocks, they're not bonds, and they don't get the same long-term capital-gains rates that those assets do.

Instead, long-term gains on physical bullion fall under the collectibles rules, with a top federal rate of 28% rather than the lower 15% / 20% you might see on long-term stock gains.

The Annual Report doesn't compute a tax-owed figure for you, and one reason is that the collectibles rate interacts with your overall tax picture in ways the app can't see — your bracket, your other gains and losses, your state's rules, and so on.

The Short-Term G/L and Long-Term G/L cards show realized gain or loss for the year, before any tax. They are not your tax bill.

What gets layered on top — your marginal rate, the collectibles rate, state taxes, available offsets, holding-period edge cases, and any deductions or carryforwards from prior years — is your tax advisor's territory. The report's job is to give that advisor a clean, item-level record to work from.

Which is the same disclaimer you'll see on every page of the report itself: this is for informational purposes only and is not tax advice.