# Which RSU Lots Should You Sell? Tax-Smart Lot Order Calculator | OptionsAhoy

> Pick the right tax lots when diversifying company stock. See the sell order, year-by-year tax, and what a FIFO sell order costs you. Free, no signup.

Markdown twin of https://optionsahoy.com/tools/rsu-lot-order (canonical). More for agents: https://optionsahoy.com/llms.txt

# Which lots should you sell first?

The same shares sold in a different order produce a different tax bill. Enter your vested lots to see which to sell first, on which dates, and what that saves versus your broker's oldest-first default.

[AlphaLatitude Inc.](https://alphalatitude.com/) · [Free Tools](https://optionsahoy.com/tools) Our tools respect your browsing privacy. Independently verified:

## Your vest lots

Shares you still hold from each vest, after sell-to-cover. Basis is the share price on vest day (your broker’s lot detail page lists it).

taxable income after deductions, all sources

Household income counts toward the net investment income tax (NIIT) threshold, so include investment income.

You ordered the lots for one position. The beta plans the sell-down alongside your other grants, hedging, and AMT across multiple years and market scenarios.

Related calculators: [Equity Funding Plan Calculator](https://optionsahoy.com/tools/equity-funding?_=related-rsu-lot-order) · [Stock Concentration Calculator](https://optionsahoy.com/tools/concentration?_=related-rsu-lot-order)

## What this calculates

- Which of your vested RSU lots to sell, and on which dates, to divest a chosen share fraction at the lowest total tax.
- Specific-lot identification: higher-basis lots realize less gain per share; underwater lots harvest losses that net against gains under full Schedule D rules.
- Long-term deferral: when waiting past the one-year mark converts a short-term (ordinary-rate) sale to long-term capital gains, with the days at risk and dollars saved both shown.
- Multi-year bracket spreading across 1, 2, or 3 tax years, with in-plan capital-loss carryforward and the $3,000 ordinary-income offset.
- Full tax coverage: federal long-term capital gains, the 3.8% net investment income tax (NIIT), and state tax (all 50 states + DC).
- A first-in-first-out (FIFO) comparison on the same schedule, so you see exactly what selling your oldest lots first would cost.

Vested lots only (unvested grants are out of scope). No growth model: every sale is priced at today's share price, so deferral is shown but its market risk is not priced. No wash-sale basis modeling (loss rows carry a warning instead). No AMT: RSU sales create none. Loss carryforward past the plan horizon is reported as a dollar figure, not modeled into future years.

[Read the deep dive: Which RSU lots should you sell first? →](https://optionsahoy.com/learn/which-rsu-lots-to-sell-first)

## Methodology

Optimization. Given your vested lots and a divest fraction, it selects which lots to sell and on which dates to divest that many shares at the lowest total plan tax across your horizon, pulling three levers: specific-lot identification (realizing less gain from higher-basis lots, or harvesting losses that offset gains under full Schedule D netting), long-term deferral (waiting past the one-year mark to convert short-term ordinary rates to long-term capital gains), and multi-year bracket spreading with in-plan capital-loss carryforward and the $3,000 ordinary-income offset. Every sale is priced at today’s share price, and the plan is scored against selling your oldest lots first (first-in-first-out) on the same schedule, so the pure lot-selection saving is stated explicitly and never drops below zero. The search is deterministic: the same inputs on the same date return the same answer, so the recommendation is verifiable.

Tax-code coverage. Relevant federal code (ordinary brackets, long-term capital gains, AMT with credit recovery, FICA, Net Investment Income Tax) plus all 50 states and DC for state ordinary brackets and LTCG treatment. State AMT modeled for CA, CO, CT, MN . Brackets reflect IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-32 and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) provisions for tax year 2026. Validated against 870+ unit tests covering bracket math, AMT credit recovery, state conformity, and the optimizer's search path.

Why use an optimizer rather than asking an LLM to do the math: a benchmark of five frontier large language models on the same multi-year ISO problem found that all 15 trials overstated the after-tax result of their own proposed schedule by 2x to 20x ([HackerNoon write-up](https://hackernoon.com/but-can-it-do-taxes-though-why-you-shouldnt-trust-chatbots-with-tax-optimization-math)).

AI assistant integration

## Use this from ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or VS Code

Ask your agent:

> “ I want to sell down half my company stock over 2 years. Which of my vested RSU lots should I sell first, and when? ”

With the OptionsAhoy MCP installed, your agent calls rsu_lot_optimize and returns the same after-tax answer this calculator computes.

## This is one position and one decision.

OptionsAhoy plans your whole equity portfolio (RSUs, options, ESPP) together, across bullish, neutral, and bearish scenarios. Free during beta.