You Probably Qualify to File Your Taxes Through IRS Free File This Year
The IRS’s Free File program is open again this tax season, marking its 23rd year as a free, online tax preparation option for millions of Americans.
For 2025, the IRS has made a major expansion to eligibility by raising the income limit to qualify for its free guided tax prep services. Now, anyone with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of up to $84,000 for tax-year 2024 can e-file their federal taxes at no cost through the program. That's up from the previous year's limit of $79,000.
The $5,000 increase continues momentum from last year, when the agency made its largest-ever expansion to eligibility by raising the income threshold by $6,000 over the previous year. Usually, these increases are $1,000 to $2,000 in a given year — if the threshold changes at all. (They did not for tax year 2021 and 2022.)
According to recent IRS tax data, roughly 70% of all taxpayers — over 100 million people — have an AGI of $84,000 or less and thus qualify for IRS Free File this year.
"Even taxpayers with small businesses, gig income and rental homes can use Free File as long as their AGI is $84,000 or below,” said Tim Hugo, the executive director of the Free File Alliance, in a recent statement. “Many taxpayers believe that Free File is only for the simplest returns, but that is simply not true.”
(This longstanding program is separate from IRS Direct File, a new IRS-run federal tax filing software program available in 25 states to residents with simple tax situations.)
How IRS Free File works
For over two decades, the IRS has partnered with the Free File Alliance, a nonprofit coalition of private tax-preparation companies, to offer a free tax filing option for low- and middle-income earners.
This year, eight companies are offering their guided tax-filing software for free to qualifying taxpayers:
- 1040Now
- Drake (1040.com)
- ezTaxReturn.com
- FileYourTaxes.com
- On-Line Taxes
- TaxAct
- TaxHawk (FreeTaxUSA)
- TaxSlayer
Some of the partners have their own qualifications, including separate income, military status or age requirements, but taxpayers who meet the overall $84,000 income cap will have at least one option to choose from.
Full details are available here, and the IRS site has a tool to help taxpayers quickly find a filing option based on their financial situation.
A perk of the Free File program is that the eight partnering companies cannot upsell folks during the filing process or offer cash advances on anticipated tax refunds — unlike many of the free versions of common tax-filing software on the market.
For those who meet the income threshold of Free File, they can fill out the step-by-step prompts of the tax software of their choosing, inputting tax information from any W-2 or 1099 forms if applicable — just as they would with any typical tax-software program. Several of the services also offer free state tax preparation.
Taxpayers who have earnings above $84,000 can still technically prepare their taxes through the Free File program, but the process is very different. The IRS offers Free File Fillable Forms to taxpayers of all income levels.
As the name suggests, Fillable Forms must be filled out manually based on the accompanying instructions. They offer very little calculation assistance, as the taxpayer is expected to do the math and work. An e-filing option is available once all forms are completed digitally. Alternatively, they can be printed, filled out and mailed directly to the IRS.
What’s next
Once submitted, any tax refunds can be tracked using the IRS's free Where’s My Refund tool. Generally, tax refunds take about 21 days to process if the return was e-filed. Refunds for taxes that were filed by mail take longer.
As for the Free File program itself, it remains a largely underutilized filing option. By the Free File Alliance’s own count, only about 75 million tax returns have been submitted since the program began in 2003. That amounts to just over 2% of all the tax returns the IRS received over that same period.
Regardless, the program appears poised to stay. The IRS recently extended it until at least October 2029.
The IRS’s new federally run tax software, Direct File, may not last nearly as long. The program has entered its second — and potentially last — tax season. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted that it may be shut down after 2025, following fierce backlash over the government-run software by the for-profit tax industry and several Republican lawmakers.
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