How to Export Venmo Transactions to Excel (2026 Guide for the 1099-K)

If you use Venmo to get paid for freelance work, sell things online, or run a small business, the 2025 tax year is the first year where a significant number of people will receive 1099-K forms from Venmo. The IRS lowered the reporting threshold to $2,500 for 2025 — down from $5,000 the year before. That means millions more Venmo users need to account for their transaction history this tax season.

This guide covers how to export your Venmo transactions to Excel, clean up the raw CSV data, separate taxable from non-taxable payments, and match your records against the 1099-K Venmo sent you.

Understanding the 1099-K Before You Export Anything

The 1099-K form reports gross payment volume received through a payment processor — in this case, Venmo. Before exporting your data, it helps to know what Venmo is actually counting.

What counts toward the 1099-K threshold:

• Payments you received that the sender designated as "goods and services"
• Sales through Venmo's business profile feature
• Any payment received through a business Venmo account

What does NOT count:

• Personal payments between friends and family (splitting bills, repaying loans, etc.)
• Money you sent to others
• Refunds you received

For tax year 2025, the threshold is $2,500. If you received more than $2,500 in goods-and-services payments, Venmo is required to send you (and the IRS) a 1099-K by January 31, 2026. If you received less, you may not get a form — but you may still owe self-employment tax on that income depending on your situation.

The threshold drops to $600 for tax year 2026, so nearly every freelancer and side-hustle earner using Venmo will receive a 1099-K next filing season.

How to Export Your Venmo Transaction History

Venmo gives you two ways to get your data — a limited in-app view and a full data export via the website. For tax prep purposes, always use the full export.

Method 1: Download Full Transaction History (Recommended)

This gives you every transaction since your account was created, not just a recent window.

On the Venmo website:

1. Log in at venmo.com from a desktop browser
2. Click your profile icon (top right) and select Settings
3. Navigate to Privacy
4. Scroll to Download Your Data and click Request Download
5. Venmo will email you a download link — typically within a few hours, sometimes up to 24 hours
6. Download the ZIP file and extract it

Inside the ZIP, you'll find a CSV file containing your complete transaction history. The filename is usually something like venmo_statement.csv or similar.

What's in the CSV:

Method 2: In-App Statement Download (Limited)

The Venmo mobile app allows you to view and download statements, but these cover shorter time windows than the full data export. Access them via:

1. Open the Venmo app
2. Tap the three-line menu (or your profile icon)
3. Go to Settings > Statements

This is adequate for reviewing a specific month, but for tax prep spanning a full year, the full data export via the website is more practical.

Opening and Cleaning the Venmo CSV in Excel

Venmo's raw CSV needs some cleanup before it's usable for tax calculations. Here's how to handle the most common issues.

Opening the File Correctly

Do not double-click the CSV to open it. Use Excel's Data > Get Data > From Text/CSV (or Data > From Text in older versions). This preserves:

• Correct date formatting
• Leading zeros in transaction IDs
• Special characters in transaction notes (emojis, foreign characters)

When the import wizard appears:

• Set delimiter: Comma
• Set encoding: UTF-8
• Check that the Datetime column is recognized as a date/time type, not text

Cleaning the Amount Column

Venmo often formats amounts as text with currency symbols (e.g., + $45.00 or - $12.50). To convert these to numbers Excel can calculate with:

1. Select the Amount column
2. Use Find & Replace (Ctrl+H):
   • Find: + $ → Replace with: `` (nothing)
   • Find: - $ → Replace with: -
   • Find: , (thousands separator) → Replace with: `` (nothing)
3. Select the cleaned column → Format Cells → Number (2 decimal places)

Alternatively, use a formula to extract the numeric value:

=VALUE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"+ $",""),"- $","-"))

Filtering to the Tax Year

If your export covers multiple years, filter to just the relevant year:

1. Select the Datetime column
2. Data > Filter
3. Use the date filter: Between → January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025

Now you're working with only the transactions that fall within the tax year you're preparing.

Separating Business from Personal Payments

This is the critical step for accurate tax reporting. Add a column called Tax Category and work through your received payments.

Identifying Payments Received

First, filter to show only payments you received:

1. Filter the Amount (total) column for positive values — these are inflows to your account
2. You can also filter To = your Venmo username, or Type = Payment

Tagging Each Payment

For each received payment, assess whether it was income:

The Note column is your friend here — most payments have a memo ("freelance logo work," "cleaning deposit," "pizza") that tells you the nature of the transaction.

Calculating Your Taxable Total

Once tagged, use a SUMIF to total each category:

=SUMIF(TaxCategory_column, "Business Income", Amount_column)

This gives you the total income to report. It should be close to — but may not exactly match — the gross amount on your 1099-K (if you received one). The difference usually comes from Venmo's fee treatment or payment timing at year-end.

Reconciling Against Your 1099-K

If Venmo sent you a 1099-K, compare its gross figure to your spreadsheet total.

Box 1a on the 1099-K shows your total gross payment volume from goods-and-services transactions. This may be higher than what you consider your income because:

• It's gross before any expenses or cost of goods
• It includes payments you later refunded
• It captures every tagged "goods and services" payment regardless of whether you consider it income

What to do if the numbers don't match:

1. Check that your date range matches the calendar year exactly (January 1 – December 31)
2. Look for goods-and-services payments your clients sent that you might have tagged as personal
3. Account for any refunds you issued — these reduce your net income but don't reduce the 1099-K gross figure

If your spreadsheet shows less income than the 1099-K, you'll need documentation explaining the difference. Keep notes on any payments that were refunded, returned, or were non-income (like a security deposit). Your categorized spreadsheet is that documentation.

For a broader guide on categorizing transactions for tax purposes, see our post on categorizing credit card expenses for taxes.

If You Have a Venmo Credit Card

The Venmo Credit Card — a Visa card issued by Synchrony Bank — is separate from your Venmo payment history. It has its own billing cycle and monthly PDF statements, which you access from within the Venmo app.

To get Venmo Credit Card transactions into Excel:

1. Open the Venmo app → tap your profile → Venmo Credit Card
2. Navigate to Statements and download the PDF for each month you need
3. Upload the PDF to CreditCardToExcel.com
4. Download the extracted Excel or CSV

This is the same process as any other Synchrony-issued credit card. CreditCardToExcel handles the structured transaction table in the statement and produces a clean spreadsheet (Date, Description, Amount, Category). For the general approach to any PDF statement, see our guide to converting credit card statements to Excel.

Tips for Freelancers Using Venmo Regularly

Ask clients to use "goods and services." When clients pay you through Venmo, they should select "goods and services" — not personal payment. This ensures buyer protection for them and creates a clean paper trail for you. Payments tagged incorrectly as personal can complicate your records.

Download monthly, not annually. Processing 12 months of transactions at once is tedious. Download your CSV monthly, clean it, and tag your income as you go. By December, your entire year's records are already organized.

Keep the original CSV alongside your cleaned version. Once you start cleaning up amount formats and deleting columns in Excel, the original raw file becomes your audit reference. Save a copy before making any changes.

Reconcile your Venmo balance. After filtering for a given period, sum your net inflows and outflows and compare to the change in your Venmo balance. If they don't match, you have a missed transaction or category error somewhere.

Consider moving to a dedicated business tool. If you're receiving meaningful income through Venmo, the manual tagging process described here works fine for a few hundred transactions. At higher volumes, connecting your Venmo account to accounting software via QuickBooks or Wave is worth the setup time. See our guide on importing credit card statements into QuickBooks for the general workflow.

Summary: Venmo Export Methods at a Glance

Getting your Venmo history into Excel is straightforward once you know where the full export lives. The manual tagging step — separating personal payments from income — is the real work, but it's also the work that protects you if your reported income is ever questioned. A categorized spreadsheet with notes is stronger documentation than relying on memory.

If you're also sorting through credit card statements from the same tax year, see our guide on creating an expense report from credit card statements for a workflow that handles both at once.