- The IRS Taxpayer Services division lost 22% of its staff between January and June of 2025.
- The average number of days to process individual paper returns increased from 16 days in the 2025 filing season to 30 days in the 2026 filing season.
- The average number of minutes that taxpayers spent to reach a customer service representative increased from eight minutes in the 2025 filing season to 14 minutes in the 2026 filing season.
DATA IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Other data highlights:
You can also download a spreadsheet with the full list of available data, including the range of years for which data is available.
The Internal Revenue Service helps taxpayers understand tax laws, accurately calculate their tax obligations, and file their taxes correctly. But decades of underfunding seriously weakened taxpayer services and the disruption of IRS operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the strain of administering over $900 billion in relief and a spike in calls to the agency, brought service to a new low. Just 11% of calls to the agency were answered by a customer service representative in fiscal year 2021 and the agency had a backlog of 35.3 million returns that had to be manually processed at the end of the filing season. The Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) described 2021 as “the Most Challenging Year Ever for Taxpayers.”
In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act allotted an additional $80 billion to the IRS, $33 billion of which was earmarked to operations support, modernization and taxpayer services. Thanks in part to those investments, backlogs decreased and IRS employees answered nine million more taxpayer calls in fiscal year 2024 than in fiscal year 2022, according to the TAS. In 2024, the IRS piloted a new service: Direct File, public software that allowed qualified taxpayers to file their taxes directly with the IRS for free.
Scroll down for a timeline of the changes in taxpayer services since January 2025 ↓
