Form 1095-A Column B Is Zero or Blank: Fixing the SLCSP for 2026

Every February people open their Marketplace statement, look at Part III, and find zeros or nothing in column B, the column Form 8962 uses to find your benchmark. Often nobody has made a mistake. The form is built to show zero or nothing in several situations, and the instructions that explain them are written for the Marketplaces that file the form, not for the people who receive it.

This guide uses both sets of instructions: the draft 2026 instructions for Form 1095-A, dated August 21, 2026, which tell the Marketplace what to put in each column, and the draft 2026 instructions for Form 8962, dated October 20, 2026, which tell you what to do when it isn’t enough. Both are drafts, so check the final versions before filing. The Form 1095-A itself has no line changes from 2025; the form text is the same apart from the year and some wording.

What column B is supposed to hold

Part III of Form 1095-A has twelve monthly lines, 21 through 32, plus line 33 for annual totals. Column A is your enrollment premium, column B is the “applicable SLCSP premium,” and column C is the advance payment of the premium tax credit sent to your insurer. The credit you’re allowed is roughly the benchmark premium in column B minus what you’re expected to contribute from your income, capped at the enrollment premium in column A, which counts both what you paid and what the advance credit paid. That makes column B the anchor for the whole reconciliation.

The Marketplace is required to send the form to you by January 31, 2027, for 2026 coverage. The Form 8962 instructions add that if you expect one and don’t have it by early February, you should contact the Marketplace.

Why column B comes back zero, blank or off

The Marketplace instructions and the Form 8962 instructions between them give five reasons. They’re worth knowing because the fix depends on which one you have.

The unpaid-premium row has an exception worth spelling out. In a month where premiums were not fully paid and advance credit payments were made, the Marketplace must still report the SLCSP as if the premiums had been paid in full in three situations: the first month of a grace period, a month where the premium payment threshold was met and a qualified health plan provides coverage, and a month where a state insurance department ordered the issuer not to terminate coverage during a declared emergency. In every other unpaid month, the SLCSP is $0. The Form 8962 draft uses the same three scenarios to decide when an unpaid month can still earn a credit, a rule in force since January 1, 2025.

The Form 8962 instructions list seven changes that can throw off column B, among them a newborn added to your tax family, someone covered for only part of the year, someone becoming eligible for, or losing eligibility for, employer coverage or other minimum essential coverage, a death and a move. The instructions say that if any of these apply and you did not notify the Marketplace, “or if you have reason to believe the Marketplace reported the wrong applicable SLCSP premium,” you work out the correct figure for the months affected.

How to get the correct SLCSP

For every month you need the benchmark premium that applies to your coverage family, not the plan you picked. The Form 8962 instructions say: “To determine your applicable SLCSP premium for each month, see Pub. 974 or, if you enrolled through the federally facilitated Marketplace, go to HealthCare.gov/Tax-Tool/.”

Before you start, work out for each month where you lived and who belonged to your coverage family, meaning the members of your tax family who were enrolled in a qualified health plan and not eligible for other minimum essential coverage that month. On November 11, 2026, the Tax Tool’s published configuration listed only 2023 through 2025 for the premium tax credit, so check that 2026 has been added before you rely on it. Publication 974 (2025 edition) offers no way to compute the premium yourself: “Only the Marketplaces are able to provide applicable SLCSP premiums.” If a state-based Marketplace’s website has no tool, “you will need to contact the state-based Marketplace directly for the correct SLCSP premium.”

If the correct SLCSP is identical for all twelve months, you can use the annual shortcut on line 11 of Form 8962. If it differs in even one month, the instructions say to check “No” on line 10 and complete lines 12 through 23. The shortcut also requires twelve months of coverage and the same enrollment premium every month.

How it flows into Form 8962

On the monthly lines, your column B figure goes into column (b). The IRS says to round the amounts from the Form 1095-A to the nearest whole dollar and enter dollars only. Column (a) takes your column A and column (f) takes your column C. Column (b) takes your corrected SLCSP, not whatever the form printed.

Two bookkeeping rules from the instructions catch people. First, with more than one 1095-A in the same state, the Marketplace should have put the same SLCSP on each; enter the figure from only one form, “do not add the amounts from each form.” Second, if you were enrolled in plans in different states, “add together the amounts from column B of the Forms 1095-A from each state.” One more small trap: the common-mistakes checklist tells you, for lines 12 through 23, to use monthly amounts from “lines 12 through 32” of the Form 1095-A. The form’s monthly lines are 21 through 32, which is what the main line instructions say, and the checklist had the same wording in 2025, so I read it as a typo.

Your expected contribution comes from line 5 of Form 8962, your income as a percentage of the poverty line. Income times the applicable percentage is line 8a, and line 8a divided by 12 is the monthly contribution on line 8b.

A worked example: why 2026 is different

The IRS gives an example that shows how a wrong column B plays out. Mike and Susan enroll together. Their Form 1095-A reports $800 in column A and $850 in column B for all twelve months. Starting August 1 Mike becomes eligible for other minimum essential coverage and doesn’t tell the Marketplace, so their coverage family shrinks to Susan alone. The IRS says the correct SLCSP for Susan alone from August through December is $400 per month, and that they enter $850 for January through July and $400 for August through December in column (b).

The IRS example doesn’t say what the error costs, so I added assumptions: a joint return, household income of $40,000, and advance payments calculated using the $850 benchmark and the same $40,000 income all year. The poverty line used for 2026 returns for a family of two in the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia is $21,150, which puts line 5 at 189 percent. The applicable figure for 189 in Table 2 of the draft instructions is 0.0607. The script below runs the numbers.

income = 40_000
line4 = 21_150                      # family of 2; 2025 poverty line used for 2026
line5 = int(income / line4 * 100)   # 189
rate = 0.0607                       # Table 2, row 189
line8a = round(income * rate)       # 2,428
line8b = round(line8a / 12)         # 202

enroll = 800                        # column A, every month
slcsp_printed = [850] * 12          # column B as printed on the 1095-A
slcsp_true = [850] * 7 + [400] * 5  # correct: $400 from August

def ptc(slcsp):
    return sum(min(enroll, max(s - line8b, 0)) for s in slcsp)

aptc = ptc(slcsp_printed)           # 7,776 paid in advance
credit = ptc(slcsp_true)            # 5,526 allowed
excess = aptc - credit              # 2,250
print(line5, line8a, line8b, aptc, credit, excess, min(excess, 750))
# 189 2428 202 7776 5526 2250 750

From January through July the monthly credit is $648, the smaller of the $800 premium and the $850 benchmark minus $202. From August through December it is $198. That is $5,526 in credit allowed against $7,776 paid in advance, an excess of $2,250.

Under the old rules this couple’s repayment would have been capped. Table 5 in the final 2025 instructions sets the limit for a line 5 figure under 200 at $750 for filing statuses other than single. For 2026 the Form 8962 draft says the taxpayer “must repay the full excess amount.” The same mistake costs $2,250 instead of $750, or $1,500 more. The excess is the $450 monthly benchmark gap times five months, and the cap used to blunt it. Our guide to Form 8962 for 2026 without the repayment cap walks through the rest of the form.

What I’d do with a zero in column B

1. Look at column C first. If advance payments were made, and column B is zero for a month when you were covered, find which cause in the table applies.
2. If column C is blank in every month, no advance credit was paid. Column B may then be blank, -0- or wrong, and the credit you’d claim on Form 8962 depends entirely on the SLCSP you look up yourself. Income matters here too: the credit disappears above 400 percent of the poverty line for 2026, as covered in our explanation of the 2027 table and the 400 percent cliff.
3. Build a month-by-month table of the correct SLCSP from the Marketplace’s tool or figures, using Publication 974 for who counts each month, and note any month your household changed.
4. Don’t wait for a corrected form; the IRS says you don’t need one.

If column C is the only column with an amount for a month, the form’s own instructions say the insurer terminated the policy for nonpayment, you can’t claim the credit for that month, and you still reconcile the whole advance payment.

A Marketplace catastrophic plan or separate dental policy doesn’t qualify for the credit even if you received a Form 1095-A for it. If you chose bronze or catastrophic coverage for health savings account reasons, see how a bronze plan HSA interacts with the ACA cliff, since an HSA contribution can move household income relative to the cliff.

What may change for 2027

A proposed regulation published on October 15, 2026 (REG-101576-26, 91 FR 65494) would change what the Marketplace reports. For households where advance payments were made, exchanges would have to exclude from both the reported enrollment premiums and the benchmark plan premiums on Form 1095-A “the portion of the premiums allocable to individuals in the tax filer’s family who are aliens not lawfully present or who are lawfully present aliens but not eligible aliens.” The proposal applies to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2026, and the preamble says that, if finalized, the IRS will have to revise the instructions for recipients and for exchanges. Comments are due November 30, 2026. This is a proposal, not a final rule, and the reporting change would start with 2027 coverage, so it doesn’t change the Form 1095-A you receive for 2026.

Sources

• IRS, Instructions for Form 1095-A (2026), draft dated August 21, 2026 — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/i1095a—dft.pdf
• IRS, Form 1095-A (2026) — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1095a.pdf
• IRS, Instructions for Form 8962 (2026), draft dated October 20, 2026 — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/i8962—dft.pdf
• IRS, Instructions for Form 8962 (2025), Table 5, repayment limitation — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/i8962—2025.pdf
• IRS, Publication 974 (2025), Applicable SLCSP premium tools — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p974.pdf
• HealthCare.gov Tax Tool — https://www.healthcare.gov/tax-tool/ (available years read from https://www.healthcare.gov/tax-tool/app.config.js on November 11, 2026)
• Treasury/IRS, proposed regulations REG-101576-26, 91 FR 65494 (October 15, 2026) — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/text/2026/10/15/2026-21056.txt