IRS numbers from the eighth week of the tax filing season—the week ending March 21, 2025—indicate that taxpayers are not excited about filing this tax season. Numbers for tax filing and processing of tax returns dipped again, a trend that hasn’t changed since the season opened on January 27, 2025.
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 79,616,000 individual income tax returns as of March 21, 2025, compared to 80,470,000 as of March 22, 2024. The dip is 1.1%, with taxpayers filing about 850,000 fewer individual tax returns to date in 2025 as compared to 2024.
For context, there were also declines early in the 2024 season since Congress initially made noise about passing some tax bills retroactively that would have, among other things, boosted the child tax credit. For comparison, the IRS had received 80,683,000 individual income tax returns by the eighth week in 2023 and 81,371,000 in 2022.
Despite staffing cuts, the IRS is generally keeping pace on the processing side. The data shows that the IRS has processed 78,675,000 individual income tax returns as of March 21, 2025, compared to 79,243,000 individual income tax returns as of March 22, 2024. That’s a decrease of .7%, on par with the dip in returns received.
Most of those returns were e-filed. In 2025, the IRS received 77,266,000 e-filed returns, compared to 78,023,000 in 2024. That’s a drop of 1.0%. Of those, the IRS reported that it received 40,120,000 individual income returns e-filed by tax professionals and 37,146,000 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 last week indicated that 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, this week, tax professionals pulled ahead a bit. 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, dropping 44.6% compared to 2024. There have been 244,432,000 visits to the website as of March 21, 2025, compared to 441,085,000 visits by March 22, 2024.
The downturn in web visits may reflect the fact that the website has not been regularly updated—there have been only a dozen or so press releases posted since the season opened.
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.
Additionally, taxpayers and tax professionals continue to express concerns about the security of their data, including making online queries on their tax accounts. Anecdotally, many have suggested that they may pause visits until they receive confirmation that their data is safe, and not subject to sharing with other federal agencies.
Tax Refunds
The data points in the tax season filing statistics that are seeing upticks are related to tax refunds. That continues a trend that began a few weeks ago, largely due to a requirement that forces the IRS to hold certain early tax refunds. By law, the IRS must hold refunds tied to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the ACTC until mid-February. The rule applies to the entire refund, even the portion not associated with the EITC and ACTC. That means if you qualify for the refundable credit, you’ll have to wait until the IRS can release it. As a result, early EITC/ACTC filers don’t normally begin to see tax refunds until around March 3, 2025.
The total number of tax refunds edged up to 55,716,000 in 2025, compared to 54,990,000 in the same period last year, an increase of 1.3%. By the numbers, that means that approximately 71% of all tax returns that have been processed to date resulted in a refund.
The average tax refund is also up as compared to last year: $3,221 per taxpayer as of March 21, 2025, compared to $3,081 as of March 22, 2024, a boost of 4.6%. The average refund issued by direct deposit increased to $3,284 in 2025 compared to $3,152 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 those early EITC/ACTC filers.)
Filing Season Information
It’s worth noting that while the end dates are a day apart, the number of days in the filing season so far are the same. The 2025 tax season began on January 27, 2025—that’s 54 days through the end date for the data on March 21, 2025. The 2024 tax season began two days later in the calendar year on January 29, 2024 and while the data set ends a day later, thanks to a leap year, the number of days through the end date for the data is still 54.
The IRS expects more than 140 million individual tax returns for tax year 2024 to be filed ahead of the April 15 federal deadline. Check back for updated statistics as the season rolls on.
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