Three New Information Returns Just Landed on the IRS’s 2026 List

What the IRS published

Revenue Procedure 2026-18 appears in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-30, dated July 20, 2026, at page 53. It supersedes Rev. Proc. 2025-22 and becomes the next revision of Publication 1179. It governs three things: filing information returns on official IRS forms, building acceptable substitutes of those forms, and furnishing statements to the people named on them.

Read cold, it’s a printer’s manual. Column widths, red ink, scannability, required legends. But the form table at the front is the IRS’s own roster of what it expects to see filed for calendar year 2026, and forty forms sit in it, running from Form 1096 through Form 1042-S. The familiar names are all present: 1099-NEC, 1099-MISC, 1099-INT, 1099-K, 1099-S, 1099-R, W-2G, 3921, 3922, and the 5498 family.

Three forms that weren’t in the 2025 revision

Two of the three are consumer-facing. Form 1098-VLI reports vehicle loan interest and Form 1099-LPS reports long-term care premiums paid. The third, Form 5498-TA, covers Trump Account contributions and behaves nothing like the other two.

The car loan interest deduction Congress enacted in July 2025 needed a reporting mechanism, and Form 1098-VLI is it. Lenders and other recipients of qualified interest have to file with the IRS and furnish a statement to the borrower. The deduction underneath it is narrower than most people assume: $10,000 a year at most, phasing out above $100,000 of modified AGI ($200,000 joint), available only for 2025 through 2028, on a loan originated after December 31, 2024 for a new personal-use vehicle secured by a lien and given final assembly in the United States. Used cars are out. Lease payments are out. A vehicle titled to your S corporation is out. And the VIN has to appear on the tax return for every year the deduction is claimed, which is a documentation requirement dressed up as a form field.

Form 1099-LPS covers long-term care premiums paid, and it sits alongside the older Form 1099-LTC, which reports benefits received. Premiums out and benefits in are opposite ends of the same policy, and now each has its own statement. Anyone doing insurance planning for older clients should expect both.

None of the three has actually been released yet. The procedure says so directly: drafts of Forms 1098-VLI, 1099-LPS and 5498-TA are posted on IRS.gov/DraftForms and have not been released to the public for filing or furnishing, with a notice to follow on the Publication 1179 page once they are. Draft status matters because line positions still move, and software vendors build against drafts every year and then rebuild.

The change that reaches every filer

Filer copies are going away. The procedure states that the IRS is removing the filer copy and the filer instructions from forms as part of an ongoing effort to cut filer burden. If your practice has been keeping the paper filer copy as the file record, that habit needs somewhere else to live before January.

Two smaller changes: address fields broken into separate boxes no longer need the break-out on recipient copies, only on the version filed with the IRS. And references to Form 1098-MA came out entirely, because the Hardest Hit Fund, Short Refinance and Making Home Affordable programs are expired and out of funding. A form leaving this document is the closest thing the tax code has to an obituary. It means the last filer stopped filing.

Why this matters if you issue 1099s

Printing and filing your own

A substitute form or statement is any version the IRS didn’t publish. To be acceptable it has to match the official form or the specifications in this procedure. You don’t send substitutes to the IRS for approval, and a privately produced form is not allowed to state that the IRS approved it.

The practical version: The red-ink Copy A someone downloaded from a website and ran through an office laser printer is not an acceptable substitute, and never was. We still see it every January, usually from a business owner who filed nine Forms 1099-NEC by hand and got everything else right.

Ten information returns in a calendar year triggers mandatory electronic filing, and the count aggregates across form types. Six Forms 1099-NEC plus five Forms W-2 is eleven, not two comfortable piles of five and six. Financial institutions reporting under chapter 3 or chapter 4 have to file Forms 1042-S electronically no matter how few they have. The threshold has been ten since tax year 2023, and it still catches contractors and small real estate partnerships working from the old 250-return rule.

Receiving the forms

Open the envelope. A Form 1098-VLI is going to look like junk mail from an auto lender, and for a qualifying loan it’s the only proof of deductible interest anyone will hand you. Clients who shred an unfamiliar tax form in February are the same clients calling in October asking why a deduction didn’t make it onto the tax return.

What to watch before January

Three things move between now and filing season. The draft forms have to be finalized and released. The separate instructions for each new form have to publish. And payroll and 1099 software vendors have to build all of it into a January release, having started from drafts.

The gap worth planning around isn’t between the law and the form. It’s between the IRS publishing a specification in July and a lender’s servicing system printing a correct statement in January. First-year information returns are wrong at a rate nobody advertises. Keep your own 2026 records of vehicle loan interest and long-term care premiums paid rather than waiting to see what arrives.

How The Reed Corporation works with clients on this

We handle information return filing inside bookkeeping and payroll compliance engagements, which makes us the ones counting whether a client crossed ten information returns and moving them to electronic filing before penalty math starts. For closely held business owners, the recurring problem isn’t the form. It’s contractor payments coded to the wrong account all year, discovered during the January 1099 run.

On the receiving side, high net worth clients and real estate investors collect a stack of information returns each year. Reconciling that stack against the actual transactions is where errors surface. A wrong Form 1098 or a duplicated Form 1099-S produces an IRS notice roughly twelve months later, and by then the correction takes three times as long.