A CPA preparing one rental property asks for the same pile every year: the rent ledger, the Form 1098 from the lender, the insurance declarations page, the property tax bill, the repair invoices, the mileage log, and the depreciation schedule from last year's return. The pile barely changes. What changes is whether you assemble it in forty minutes in December or reconstruct it over a weekend in March, one bank statement at a time.
The checklist below is grouped the way Schedule E (Form 1040) is grouped, by line, so every box you tick maps to a number your preparer will actually type. I close my own books on the 5th of each month, and the December close is the only one that doubles as tax prep; this is the list I work through. For the background on how each of these numbers gets taxed, the plain-English guide to rental property taxes covers that. This page is the gather list.
The checklist, grouped by Schedule E line
Print one copy per property. The brackets are yours to fill in; everything else is the same for nearly every small residential landlord filing on Schedule E.
Year-end tax prep checklist (one per property)
The December items expire first
Most of the list can wait for January. Three items cannot, and they happen to be the three landlords skip most often.
- W-9s from contractors. If you paid an unincorporated plumber, painter, or handyman $600 or more during the year, you likely owe them a Form 1099-NEC by January 31, and you cannot file it without their taxpayer ID. Ask for the W-9 in December, while they still want your next job; the full decision tree is in the 1099-NEC guide for landlords.
- The mileage log close-out. At the 2026 rate of 72.5 cents per mile, 1,200 documented rental-business miles is an $870 deduction; undocumented miles are worth nothing. Reconstruct the log now, while the calendar and the receipts still jog memory. What counts as a deductible trip, and what counts as commuting, is covered in the landlord mileage deduction guide.
- December payments. Most landlords are cash-basis taxpayers who deduct expenses in the year paid, not the year billed. A $1,400 furnace repair paid December 30 lands on this year's return; the same invoice paid January 2 waits a full filing cycle. Whether accelerating helps depends on your income in both years, which is a CPA conversation worth having before the 31st, not after.
The boxes that move real money
Line 18, depreciation, is usually the largest deduction on the form and the one this list protects. Your preparer needs three things: the closing statement, the land vs building split (the county assessor record usually works), and the in-service date. With those, say you bought a duplex for $340,000 with $74,000 of assessed land value: the building basis is $266,000 and the straight-line deduction over 27.5 years is about $9,673 a year. You can run your own numbers in the depreciation calculator.
The other money box is the improvements stack. Invoices at $2,500 or less per invoice can generally be expensed under the de minimis safe harbor; a roof or HVAC system above that gets capitalized and depreciated instead. Keep the two piles physically separate before the CPA meeting, because unsorted invoices default to whatever takes the preparer the least time. The classification calls are worked through in repairs vs improvements, and each line on the form is unpacked in Schedule E, line by line.
Where the pile lives the rest of the year
Every item on this checklist is a document that existed months before December: the declarations page arrived with the policy renewal, the 1098 in late January, the repair invoice the week of the repair. The failure mode is not missing paper, it is paper scattered across an email inbox, a glovebox, and a kitchen drawer. I built rents.ai because my spreadsheets kept dropping exactly these things; it stores leases, invoices, 1098s, and insurance declarations against each property, rolls categorized transactions into a Schedule E view by line, and lets you set a reminder for the January 31 1099 deadline. It will not file the 1099 or the return, and its tax figures are estimates for your CPA to check, not advice. The checklist still gets worked by a person; the software's job is making sure nothing on it has to be hunted for.
Tax season is a filing problem only if the rest of the year was a filing problem.
This checklist organizes your year for your CPA; it is an estimate of what a preparer needs, not tax advice. Thresholds like the $600 1099-NEC trigger and the $2,500 de minimis safe harbor carry conditions and elections behind them, and IRS Publication 527 is the governing publication for residential rental income and expenses. Your preparer makes the final calls.