The IRS’s New Free Site for Tax Filing Is Now Up and Running Julie Zauzmer Weil - The Washington Post
go to original March 5, 2024

You can now file your taxes free on the Direct File website if you qualify. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

After weeks of testing, the IRS’s new government-run website for free tax filing is now open for the rest of this year’s tax season to users in 12 states.

The Direct File website, the Biden administration’s attempt to test a free competitor to commercial software like Intuit’s TurboTax, is debuting midway through tax season, at a time when more than two-thirds of all households have yet to file their returns. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.

Taxpayers who live in the participating states and whose taxes are simple enough to qualify can create an account on the site and file their taxes any time, starting Monday, the IRS announced. For this year, Direct File excludes some groups of taxpayers, including the self-employed and those with wages of more than $200,000 a year.

The Direct File site is a test of the concept of government-run tax filing. After Congress authorized a study in 2022 and the IRS moved quickly to set up a website, the program first opened last month just to government employees who volunteered to try it before offering a few brief testing windows to curious taxpayers.

Direct File will now be continuously open, although the site might briefly close if it gets too many users on one day during this first week, the IRS said.

The Direct File site is open to taxpayers in Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.

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