IRS numbers from the tenth week of the tax filing season—the week ending April 4, 2025—suggest that taxpayers are finally ready to file their tax returns. The number of tax returns received dipped again, a trend that hasn’t changed since the season opened on January 27, 2025, but the gap is narrowing.
Filing and Processing Dips
The most recent tax season filing data from IRS shows that the agency still hasn’t received as many tax returns this year as last year. The data shows that the IRS received 101,422,000 individual income tax returns as of April 4, 2025, compared to 101,849,000 as of April 5, 2024. The dip, however, is just .4%, with 427,000 fewer individual tax returns filed to date in 2025 as compared to 2024.
Despite staffing cuts, the IRS is generally keeping pace on the processing side. The data shows that the IRS has processed 100,324,000 individual income tax returns as of April 4, 2025, compared to 100,110,000 individual income tax returns as of April 5, 2024. That’s an increase of .2%.
Most of those returns were e-filed. In 2025, the IRS received 98,184,000 e-filed returns, compared to 98,421,000 in 2024. That’s a drop of .2%. Of those, the IRS reported that it received 53,392,000 individual income returns e-filed by tax professionals and 44,792,000 self prepared e-filed returns.
Most tax professionals will e-file your return—not only are some required to e-file (a 2010 requires specified tax return preparers to e-file certain federal income tax returns), the IRS says that e-filing is more secure and more likely to be accurate. As National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins put it when recommending e-filing: “Paper is the IRS’ kryptonite.”
While a few weeks ago, the number of e-filed returns prepared by professionals was nearly neck and neck with the number of e-filed returns that was self-prepared, tax professionals now have the edge. That makes sense since taxpayers who have simple returns often e-file early, while those taxpayers with more complicated returns tend to rely on their tax professionals to file.
Web Visits
Web visits to IRS.gov continued lag far behind last year’s numbers. There have been 275,948,000 visits to the website as of April 4, 2025, compared to 497,397,000 visits by March 22, 2024. That’s a drop of about 45% but you won’t see that number on the IRS website. For most of the tax season, the percentage drop was calculated. However, now a footnote on the website reads, “Changes were made from 2024 to 2025 in the analytics methodology used to evaluate the number of visits to IRS.gov. Previously a session-based approach was used. In 2025, an event-based model is being used. As a result, comparison of data sets from year to year should not be made.”
Despite those protestations, I would suggest that traffic to irs.gov is still down. The website has not been regularly updated—there have been only a dozen or so press releases posted since the season opened. And, most recently, following tweaks to the site, tax professionals reported numerous errors.
Taxpayers seeking the status of their tax refund may click over to the website to check the status of their tax refunds using the Where’s My Refund tool?. The IRS says that Where’s My Refund? remains the best way to check the status of a refund. It provides taxpayers with three key pieces of information: receipt of your federal tax return, approval of your tax refund, and issuing date of your approved tax refund.
Refund status information is typically available within 24 hours after the IRS receives your e-filed tax return for the current tax year, three to four days after receipt of your e-filed tax return or four weeks after mailing your paper return. The IRS only updates the tool once a day, usually overnight.
Tax Refunds
Taxpayers are still seeing upticks are related to tax refunds.
The total number of tax refunds edged up to 67,745,000 in 2025, compared to 66,799,000 in the same period last year, an increase of 1.4%. By the numbers, that means that approximately 68% of all tax returns that have been processed to date resulted in a refund. That percentage is a bit smaller than last week’s 71% but expected—typically, returns filed earlier in the season are those seeking a refund, while those who file later may break even or owe.
The average tax refund is up as compared to last year: $3,116 per taxpayer as of April 4, 2025, compared to $3,011 as of April 5, 2024, a boost of 3.5%. The average refund issued by direct deposit increased to $3,186 in 2025 compared to $3,088 for the same time period last year.
(While refund numbers are up compared to last year, there’s a little bit of a dip compared to earlier in the year when they hit $3,453. The higher refund numbers are typically attributed to early filers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit.)
Filing Season Information
The IRS expects more than 140 million individual tax returns for tax year 2024 to be filed ahead of the April 15, 2025, federal deadline. Check back for updated statistics as the season rolls on.
Read the full article here