Your broker can't see your accounts at other brokers. The IRS can.

Short answer: yes, the wash-sale rule applies across all your accounts. Under IRC §1091, the rule attaches to you the taxpayer, not to any one account. Sell at a loss at Schwab and re-buy at Robinhood eleven days later? Wash sale. Your IRA's auto-invest buys it back? Wash sale — a permanently unrecoverable one. Your spouse re-buys it? Also a wash sale, per IRS Publication 550 — whether you file jointly or separately. Meanwhile, don't count on any broker to warn you: a broker can't see your accounts at other brokers.

Does the wash sale rule apply across brokerage accounts?

Yes. IRC §1091 disallows a loss when you acquire substantially identical stock or securities within 30 days before or after the loss sale — a 61-day window counting the sale day — with no account limitation whatsoever. The statute speaks of the taxpayer's acquisitions, full stop. The 61-day window spans every brokerage account you own, your traditional and Roth IRAs (Rev. Rul. 2008-5), and, per Pub 550, your spouse's accounts and corporations you control. Pub 550's wording is simply "your spouse or a corporation you control" — there is no filing-status condition, so married filing separately is covered too.

Do brokers track wash sales across accounts?

Not required to. Under the broker-reporting regulations (Treas. Reg. §1.6045-1), a broker must adjust for wash sales when the loss and the replacement involve identical securities (same CUSIP) in the same account. Schwab's own investor education says exactly this. A broker may report more, but none can see your accounts at other brokers, so your 1099-B may show only that narrow view. Check what yours actually shows so you don't adjust twice. TurboTax and other consumer software then take 1099-Bs largely at face value, so a cross-account violation can pass unnoticed at every step — see what box 1g actually covers.

The 61-day window, visualized

Buy substantially identical shares anywhere in the red zone and the loss is disallowed. Day +31 is the first clean re-buy date (often called the safe re-buy date); our checker shows it for each open loss in the files you import.

The three ways it happens to real people

1. The two-broker dip-buy. You harvest a loss in your "serious" account, then your fun-money account buys the dip nine days later. Two apps, zero warnings, one disallowed deduction.
2. The IRA auto-invest. Your IRA's scheduled purchase or dividend reinvestment buys the ticker you just harvested. Per Rev. Rul. 2008-5 the loss doesn't defer — it evaporates, and neither custodian is required to report it on a form they send you. Full explainer.
3. The spouse's account. Their re-buy is your wash sale — Pub 550 says so, with no filing-status condition. Almost nobody tracks this by hand across four or five accounts.

Who fixes it at tax time? You do.

Cross-account adjustments go on Form 8949: code "W" in column (f) with the disallowed amount in column (g), per the Form 8949 instructions. If you use TurboTax, we wrote a step-by-step guide to entering multi-account wash sales. The deferred loss isn't gone in the ordinary case — it moves into the replacement lot's basis — but the paperwork is on you, and in the IRA case there is no paperwork that gets it back.

How to actually check (without handing anyone your logins)

You need every account's trades in one ledger. You do not need to link your brokerage accounts to an aggregator to get it: most brokers export trade history as CSV in a couple of minutes (Robinhood's report takes 2–24 hours to generate, so request it early). Our per-broker walkthroughs cover Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, Interactive Brokers, and E*TRADE.

Wash-Sale Guardian merges those CSVs into one ledger in your browser and shows the cross-account wash sales it finds in the trades you import, with dollar amounts, the currently open 30-day danger windows with the first day a re-buy no longer washes each loss, and a year-end adjusted-basis summary for your CPA. Free, no signup, no account linking; the full detection methodology is public, including its limitations.

Frequently asked questions