The crypto tax bill cleared committee 38 to 5, and the substitute's only change was to fix the retroactive date

What happened

The House Committee on Ways and Means marked up H.R. 10357, the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, at 10 a.m. on 16 September 2026 in HVC-210, and its own record of the meeting gives four recorded outcomes. The Chairman's amendment in the nature of a substitute "passed by voice vote (with a quorum being present)". A motion by Mr Buchanan to table Mr Doggett's appeal of the ruling of the chair "was agreed to by a roll call vote of 25 yeas and 16 nays". Two amendments filed by Mr Doggett were "not agreed to" by roll call votes of 12 to 28 and 16 to 25. And the bill "was ordered favorably reported to the House of Representatives as amended by an Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute, offered by Chairman Smith, by a roll call vote of 38 yeas and 5 nays". The substitute itself is one page. The Joint Committee on Taxation's description of it, JCX-50-26 of 15 September, says the amendment "strikes the language of the bill and replaces it with similar language with the following changes", and then lists one change: "The amendment replaces the phrase 'date of the introduction of this Act' with 'September 14, 2026' wherever it appears in the introduced bill." It names six places by section, page and line, among them section 301(e) on dispositions, section 302(e) on constructive sales, section 303(d)(2) on foreign entities and section 305(c) on taxable years and on digital assets issued. That is the whole of the amendment the committee voted on. The revenue table, JCX-48-26 of 14 September, scores the bill at a net $500m over the ten years from 2027 to 2036, and the annual pattern is the interesting part: plus $367m, $563m, $530m, $330m and $50m in the first five years, then minus $135m, $168m, $247m, $363m and $427m in the second five. The largest raisers are the treatment of dealers and traders of widely traded digital assets at $2,332m, the application of wash sale rules to traded digital assets at $1,707m, subpart F and PFIC rules at $571m, certain stablecoin lending treated as indebtedness at $552m and constructive sale rules at $272m. The largest costs are the de minimis digital asset fee exception at $2,365m, the reinstatement of the rules for wagering losses at $1,997m, charitable contributions of certain digital assets at $640m, the broker requirements at $338m and simplified accounting for gain and loss on widely traded digital assets at $141m. Several provisions, including the treatment of United States dollar stablecoin transactions and the digital asset trading safe harbour, carry a marker of no revenue effect or a negligible one rather than a figure. The table assumes enactment on 31 December 2026 and calls the estimates preliminary.

Why it matters

Two bills on the same subject reached a vote within 48 hours of each other and the results were not close to each other. The market structure bill failed cloture in the Senate 49 to 50 against a three-fifths threshold on 15 September, with no votes from the minority. The tax bill was ordered reported by a committee 38 to 5 on the 16th. What separates them is not that one is smaller in ambition; it is that one allocates jurisdiction between two agencies and the other moves $500m over a decade, which is about $50m a year in a federal budget measured in trillions. A bill with no fiscal consequence and no turf in it can be bipartisan. The fiscal shape is the sharper point. The money comes in early, from anti-abuse provisions that apply existing rules to digital assets: the wash sale rule, constructive sales, subpart F and PFIC treatment, and mark-to-market for dealers and traders. The money goes out later, from reliefs that start in 2028: the de minimis exception for fees and the simplified accounting election. So the same statute is a tax increase for the first Congress that lives under it and a tax cut for the ones after, and the crossover falls in 2032. Anyone reading the headline number as the cost of the bill is reading an average of two different policies. The substitute answers a question this desk raised on 15 September and answers it in the strictest way available. Section 301 as introduced disallowed wash sale losses on dispositions after "the date of the introduction of this Act", a phrase that fixes the date to an event rather than to a day, and the bill was introduced on 14 September. The committee has now written 14 September 2026 into the text, so the disallowance is retroactive to a date two days before the markup and will be retroactive by however long the bill takes to become law, if it does. Taxpayers who sold at a loss on 15 September are inside a rule that did not exist when they sold. And Title VII is worth naming because it has nothing to do with this beat. Reinstating the rules for wagering losses costs $1,997m over ten years, the second largest single item in the table, and it is a gambling deduction riding in a digital asset tax bill. Four fifths of the bill's gross cost is accounted for by that provision and the fee exception together.

What is not settled

The texts of the two Doggett amendments are not published on the committee's markup page, so what the minority proposed and the committee rejected by 12 to 28 and by 16 to 25 cannot be read; nor can the ruling of the chair that was appealed. The committee publishes no separate record of a markup's result either: it edits the event page in place, so the address that carried the notice of meeting before the markup is the address that now carries the votes, and a reader cannot see the page as it stood on either day. jct.gov returns 403 to both tools available here, so the Joint Committee's own copies of JCX-48-26 and JCX-50-26 were read from the committee's server instead. No floor date has been announced and no Senate companion has been introduced. The score assumes enactment on 31 December 2026, which is a little over three months away with the market structure bill stalled.