You would need the closing statement to enter the purchase price and certain closing cost items (but not all) that are considered to increase the purchase price. This reduces your capital gains and could potentially reduce the amount of repayment that you owe. However, it is also possible that entering those closing costs wouldn’t make a penny difference in your repayment and so you don’t have to worry about not being able to find them. Hopefully you at least remember the purchase price of the house. This would also be listed on a real estate website like Zillow or redfin.
Suppose you purchased the home for $150,000 and you are selling it for $200,000. After subtracting the credit, your purchase price becomes $142,500, then adding back the repayments you have made so far should bring your adjusted cost basis up to about $147,000. After adjusting for the real estate commission, your selling price becomes $188,000. This means you have a taxable gain of $41,000. Since your gain is more than the amount of the remaining credit that you have to repay (which should be about $2500), you owe full repayment of the remaining credit. if you had your closing statement and could prove an extra $5000 of includeable closing costs, that would increase your adjusted cost basis and reduce your capital gain. But your gain would still be far more than your remaining credit amount and so you would still owe full repayment.
The only time that adding back those closing costs would help you is if your selling price is very close to the original purchase price and you have very little gain on the house. If you are that close to the edge, then adding a few hundred dollars of closing costs, if you could prove them, might reduce the amount of credit repayment you owe.
So bottom line, if you have a large gain on the sale of the house, don’t worry about losing your closing statement. It would not reduce the repayment that you owe. If you have a very small gain and you think that adding those costs might reduce your repayment, the only thing I can suggest is to ask the closing agent or your attorney. Based on the time involved, even if they have the records, they may charge you a fee to retrieve them.
