topic Form 8606 Basis Confusion. in Get your taxes done using TurboTax

Form 8606 Basis Confusion.

Robert1888 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:38:31 GMT

Hello,

This is our first year doing a backdoor Roth IRA. We both opened traditional IRAs in April 2022 for the first time, but have separate Roth accounts from before that we funded 2 years ago. We contributed 6,000 post tax dollars for both me and my wife to a traditional IRA in April 2022, and converted the contributions to a new Roth IRA account the following day completed by our financial advisors. We have not received 5498 forms yet, and understand that this should be reported on our 2022 taxes. When I filled out all of the information on Turbo Tax, it came up as a nontaxable event, which I believe is correct.

My main question is when looking at the 8606 form it shows that in line 14 our Basis in traditional IRAs for 2021 and earlier years is 6,000. From examples I have found online as well as when I hand fill out the 8606 form, I believe this should be 0 instead. I can't figure out what I did wrong in answering the questions that triggered it to look like that.

Could you please help me out with this?

Re: Form 8606 Basis Confusion.

RobertB4444 — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:02:52 GMT

You had a $6000 basis in the traditional IRA's during the year and you withdrew it. It will be zero on 2022s return.

Re: Form 8606 Basis Confusion.

Robert1888 — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:25:09 GMT

So with line 14 being 6000 it just means that for my traditional IRA all of that contribution that was made was post tax/nondeductible contribution.

I started writing out the below form thinking I found a mistake, but once I recalculated it line 14 is correct the way that turbo tax had it. I am going to leave the below on my response just for others that may be looking for the same thing when referencing other online tutorials that will show line 14 being zero for the first year, instead of how it is filled out.

Thank you so much for your help, I feel much more at ease now!

When I look at form 8606 and hand fill it out it looks like/ what I understand it as:

line 1 nondeductible contributions 6,000 (amount I contributed post tax this year)

line 2 total basis 0 (no previous traditional IRA account)

line 3 No to distribution, but YES to Roth IRA conversion

Line 4 contributions from 1/1/22-4/18/22 6,000 (since I just made all contributions in april)

Line 5, line 4-3 is zero

Line 6 Value of traditional IRA in 2021 zero (since I didn't fund till 2022)

Line 7 Distributions is zero

Line 8 Amount converted from traditional to roth would be 6,000

Line 9 is 6,000

Line 10 is zero

Line 11 would be zero again

Line 12 would be zero

Line 13 would be zero

Line 14 my total basis in traditional IRAs for 2021 and earlier would be 6,000

Line 15a would be zero

Line 16 would be zero as I converted to a Roth in 2022, and not 2021.

Line 17 would be zero.

Line 18, taxable amount would be zero.