The government's own free tax filing tool did not operate this year. Treasury said so in a report to Congress on October 2, 2025, citing high costs and limited participation, and the IRS told the 25 participating states a month later that it would not be available for the 2026 season and no launch date had been set. The verb matters. Congress did not repeal it; the House language requiring termination did not survive into the enacted budget law, which instead created a task force and appropriated $15 million. The executive branch simply stopped running the program.
Whether it comes back is better answered by a staffing table than a bill tracker. The National Taxpayer Advocate's figures show the tool's staff going from 26 people to 3 during 2025. What remains for an older filer unwilling to pay for software is a public-private arrangement from 2002 and a volunteer corps older than the statute authorizing it.
The Option Almost Nobody Uses
Free File offers guided commercial software free to filers with adjusted gross income of $89,000 or less. About 3.2 million returns came through it in fiscal 2025, roughly three percent of the 98 million eligible households, close to its average since 2003 and well below its 2004 peak near six percent.
The reasons are structural. A filer must start at the IRS website; going straight to a partner's site forfeits the free offer. The 2005 agreement that set eligibility at the bottom 70 percent of filers also barred any member company from offering free filing to more than half of eligible taxpayers. H&R Block left after the 2020 season and Intuit after 2021, together having served roughly 70 percent of participants, and membership has fallen from 17 firms to eight. Auditors examining 2019 data found 44 percent of users had income of $17,000 or less and most were single filers under 35. It is not a retirees' program.
The Mechanics of a Scope Chart
Every free option is defined by a list of what it will not handle, and those lists are where retirement income runs into trouble. The government tool, in its last year, accepted wages, Social Security, unemployment, interest and retirement distributions. It did not accept rental income, did not allow itemizing, and did not prepare a state return. It also never had to handle the new senior deduction, which first applies to tax year 2025, filed in the one season the tool did not run.
The volunteer sites run on their own scope chart, broader where it matters here. Social Security, pensions, IRA distributions, ordinary investment gains, itemized deductions and the senior deduction are in scope. Out of scope: rental income, with narrow exceptions; complicated capital gains such as options; solar and clean vehicle credits; the alternative minimum tax. One elastic clause does most of the work, excluding investment income or itemized deductions not covered in volunteer training. The real boundary is what the volunteer in front of you was trained on. IRS guidance tells coordinators to tell an out-of-scope taxpayer plainly that they are not eligible and send them to Free File or a paid preparer.
Who Actually Does This Work
Tax Counseling for the Elderly rests on a 1978 statute, outside the tax code, whose regulation defines elderly as age 60 or over at the close of the year, with only one spouse needing to qualify on a joint return. The same regulation makes reimbursement to sponsors dependent on appropriated funds.
The appropriation is small. Of $53 million in volunteer tax assistance grants for 2026, the elderly program received $12 million across 48 grantees, against $41 million and 315 grantees for the general program. Applicants requested $79 million; 479 applied and 363 were funded. The IRS says a majority of these sites are run by the AARP Foundation's Tax-Aide program, which began in 1968, a year before the IRS's own volunteer initiative and ten years before the statute. Together the programs ran about 9,000 sites with 84,500 volunteers and prepared 2.9 million returns this year.
What Happens If You Need to Ask a Question
The agency behind all of it is smaller. The Taxpayer Advocate recorded the IRS workforce falling from 102,101 to 74,465 over calendar 2025, a 27 percent cut. In the 2026 season the IRS received 48.1 million calls and answered 9.9 million with a live assistor, about 21 percent, with average hold times doubling to 14 minutes. Fully staffed walk-in assistance centers numbered 42 nationally, down from 102, and they take appointments only.
The free filing problem for an older household is not really about software, because the return itself is usually simple and the hard part is the one question nobody is staffed to answer. Two things follow. Book a volunteer appointment early, since sites release slots in small batches. And ask beforehand whether that site handles the items on your return, because the answer is set by local training rather than any national rule.
— John Stone