Tax Strategies for ETFs You Should Know (2024)

The ease of buying and sellingexchange-traded funds (ETFs), along with their lowtransaction costs, have made them popular with investors. They account for over 30% of the daily trading volume on U.S. stock exchanges. They are also more tax-efficient, which is integral to their appeal, especially when competing with mutual funds for your investment dollars. But how much of an advantage do they offer?

Investors need to understand this to strategize better using these funds in their portfolios. We'll begin by exploring the tax rules that apply to ETFs and the exceptions you should know. We also give you numbers from the most recent research on how much the tax benefit of ETFs is. Then, we will show you some money-saving tax strategies that can help you earn a higher return.

Taxes on ETFs

ETFs are often said to have better tax treatment than mutual funds because of their structure. They create and redeem shares using in-kind transactions, which aren't considered sales and, therefore, don't trigger taxable events. This arises from a section of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code of 1986, Section 852(b)(6), which exempts the distribution of capital gains when the shares that have appreciated in value are given to "in kind" redeeming investors (namely the market makers for the ETFs).

That's the overall structure behind ETFs. However, selling your shares in an ETF is a taxable event. Whether you have a long-term or short-term capital gain or loss depends on how long you've held the shares. In the U.S., you need to hold an ETF for more than a year to benefit from any sale being treated as long-term capital gains. If you hold it for a year or less, it's considered a short-term gain, which typically results in a higher tax rate.

The Data on the Tax Advantages of ETFs

Financial advisors and websites often tout how ETFs are more tax-efficient than mutual funds. Studies have also shown that this tax efficiency has been a major part of their appeal for investors choosing between the two. However, while the conventional wisdom on this is everywhere, data behind the claim is not. However, without specifics, it's hard to weigh this advantage against other investment options, including mutual funds.

Recent research offers a clearer picture of any advantages, but you might want to temper expectations should you anticipate eye-popping numbers. For decades, the tax benefits of ETFs have been among the "just so" stories on Wall Street. It goes like this: When mutual fund managers buy and sell securities within the fund, capital gains from these transactions are passed on to investors as distributions, which are typically taxable events, even if you don't sell your shares. Meanwhile, ETFs use a creation and redemption process that involves in-kind transactions, allowing them to avoid triggering capital gains taxes until investors sell their ETF shares. This makes ETFs more tax-efficient.

While the creation and redemption structure of ETFs does offer a tax advantage, there's reason to think any such differences between ETFs and mutual funds have narrowed. For example, mutual funds have reduced turnover rates, often in a bid to compete with ETFs by cutting fees and the number of taxable events for shareholders. Although not always the case, lower turnover rates should result in more tax efficiency (though what assets are turned over and when is crucial), especially for equities funds. In recent years, comparable passively managed index mutual funds and ETFs have had similar turnover rates.

So, is there a tax advantage for ETFs over mutual funds? A Villanova and University of Pennsylvania study updated in early 2024 puts their overall average annual after-tax advantage at 0.92%. While to many, this might not seem like much, those who shop around for minute differences in expense ratios and know the power of compounding can see that, while not earth-shattering, it's significant. Indeed, the authors conclude it's enough to be "a significant driver of the capital migration by high-net-worth investors from mutual funds intoETFs." Drilling down into their numbers, though, we see less of a difference between, for example, index mutual funds and similar ETFs. Using a method giving them bottom-line results supposing all investors are from the highest tax brackets (thus amplifying potential differences between the two fund types) and data from the 1990s to 2017 (which cuts off some of the recent movement of mutual funds toward more ETF-like turnover on average), they found the annual average tax burden of a passively managed ETF was 0.37% against 0.84% for a mutual fund.

Other studies show more of a convergence. For example, Derek Horstmeyer, a professor of finance at George Mason University, pulled data on ETFs and mutual funds with similar holdings, choosing pairs with the same objectives within the same mutual fund families. While not a large sample—he and his colleagues used 10 matched pairs in each of six asset classes—it's not too broad either, giving you macro figures on all ETFs and mutual funds in a way that isn't very actionable. The data showed that ETFs provide an extra 0.20% post-tax performance compared with their mutual fund counterparts. The differences varied across asset classes, ranging from 0.33% for international equity funds to 0.03% for fixed-income funds.

To make this concrete, data for U.S. large-cap ETFs and mutual funds showed annualized 10-year returns of 10.11% and 9.95%, respectively. This means that over a decade, investors who put $100,000 in a mutual fund would have about $3,700 less than if they had invested in an ETF. For other sectors, Horstmeyer found the following differences: small-cap equity, 0.20%, growth equity funds, 0.22%, and value funds, 0.20%.

These numbers make clear that tax efficiency shouldn't be the sole factor driving your investment decision. Other aspects, like investment strategy, fees, and portfolio goals, might make more of a difference in your after-tax returns. Therefore, it's essential to dig into each fund's specific details to make a choice that aligns with your financial goals. Seeking the advice of a tax professional is also always a prudent part of this.

Tax Strategies vs. Tax Avoidance

While perhaps mutual funds have lowered some tax-efficiency differences, ETF investors have not stood still, looking for means to increase the potential tax advantages of these funds. Below, we'll discuss other strategies, but one recent study puts numbers to what the New York Times was reporting as long ago as 1998: traders often get around the federal law against wash sales by using ETFs. A wash sale is when you sell or trade a security at a loss and then, within 30 days of the sale, buy, trade, or obtain a contract or option to purchase a substantially "substantially identical" one.

When investors attempt to claim a tax deduction for a loss on a security while quickly repurchasing the same or very similar security, it's seen as an attempt to artificially book a loss without actually changing their investment positions. In short, those doing this are trying to capture the loss for tax purposes without taking any real risk in the market. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considers this an abuse of tax laws designed to prevent taxpayers from claiming unjustified deductions. Wash sales have long been illegal for securities like stocks.

One would think it would thus be illegal for ETFs, but a 2023 ProPublica report found tax experts divided and no record of IRS enforcement on the matter. They also detail trades that, while nearly a decade old, look like classic examples of what the wash sales laws were meant to ban. Working with IRS tax records, they reported that in 2015, Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, sold $17 million in shares of Vanguard’s emerging markets ETF, booking a loss of $2.9 million. The same day, Acton put $17 million into Blackrock's emerging markets ETF, essentially purchasing very similar holdings amassed in the same mix of Chinese and other companies with a similar record of returns.

Having already booked those trades, later that year, Acton did the same in reverse after the Blackrock ETF began to decline. He sold the Blackrock and went back to Vanguard, booking another $600,000 in tax losses. Thus, in a year in which his emerging market ETF holdings were largely unchanged, according to ProPublica, Acton booked $3.5 million in losses just counting these two trades.

He was far from alone. A recent study by Wentlao Li from Oxford University shows the extent to which investors have been taking advantage. Li notes what we've described before, namely how investors are using ETFs to engage in tax-loss harvesting. (He labels Investopedia's article as "guidance" to doing these trades, but we merely describe the practice.) "Tax-loss harvesting with ETFs resides in a regulatory grey area of U.S. tax law," he writes while explaining well how the IRS has left open a situation where if you sell an ETF at a loss and repurchase the same one within a month, you engage in a wash sale. However, if it's a different ETF, no matter how similar the holdings and objectives, as in the Acton example, you can treat the wash-sale rule as inapplicable. The study notes that this is even the case for ETFs whose returns have a 99.67% correlation.

Li and ProPublica both cite advertisem*nts from asset managers touting the benefits of a strategy that would be illegal for other securities, but Li adds to previous reporting by going beyond specific cases and giving us a picture of how it's affecting the market. The study reports that for ETFs whose returns are highly correlated, about 9.1% trading volume of their AUM is related to tax-loss harvesting, or about 20.7% of these ETFs' total trading volume. It also shows that this is most pronounced for highly liquid funds with high AUMs, so this is a practice far from the margins of the trading world.

Li ends the study by calling on regulators to clarify IRS rules to ensure that traders aren't engaging in wash sales of "substantially identical" ETFs, noting that about $30 billion in 2024 USD is lost to taxpayers annually through these trades. This, he says, is a subsidy to ETF traders by other investors. Some analysts have suggested changes to federal law, like adjusting the notion of "substantially identical" to "substantially similar," though any changes could still be difficult to enforce while inhibiting some of what would otherwise be legal trading among actually different ETFs. In the meantime, traders will continue to seize the advantage. Perhaps demonstrating the law of unintended consequences and it's not a problem that's going away, Li's study was reported in Financial Planning under the headline "Study Finds 'New Source of Tax Efficiency for ETFs.'"

Dividends and Interest Payment Taxes

With the broader ETF tax discussion out of the way, we can get down to the details you need when trading. Dividends and interest payments from ETFs are taxed like income from the underlying stocks or bonds they hold. For U.S. taxpayers, this income needs to be reported on form 1099-DIV. If you profit by selling shares in an ETF, that is taxed, like when you sell stocks or bonds.

If you hold an ETF for more than a year, you'll pay up to 20% in long-term capital gains tax. Individuals with substantial investment income may also pay an additional 3.8% net investment income tax (NIIT). ETFs held for less than a year are taxed at ordinary income rates, which go up 37%, plus an additional 3.8% NIIT for some.

As with stocks, you are subject to the wash-sale rules, as we noted above. If your loss was disallowed because of the wash-sale rules, you should add the disallowed loss to the cost of the new ETF shares. This increases your basis in the new ETF, which postpones the deduction until you sell it. Your holding period for the new ETF begins on the same day as the holding period for the ETF shares that were sold.

Most ETFs hold dividend-paying stocks. The dividends they pay you can be either ordinary (taxable) or qualified (taxed at lower capital gains rates). Your ETF provider will specify which type you received. For example, if your ETF holds Apple Inc. (AAPL) stock and Apple pays a qualified dividend, that money flows through the ETF to you as a qualified dividend. But if your ETF holds bonds, the interest payments are ordinary dividends. These dividends are taxable when paid by the ETF.

Exceptions: Currency, Futures, and Metals

There are exceptions to the general tax rules for ETFs. An excellent way to think about these exceptions is to know the tax rules for specific sectors since the ETF likely follows those tax rules. Currencies, futures, crypto, and metals are the sectors that receive special tax treatment.