A free, online tax filing platform run by the IRS will not be available during next year’s filing season.
The IRS sent an email on Monday to 25 states it partnered with on Direct File, which has been running for two filing seasons, telling them that “Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026,” and that “no launch date has been set for the future.”
The agency’s internal announcement, first reported by the Washington Post and NextGov/FCW, has been largely understood to mean the end of Direct File — a project that Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly targeted this year.
Former members of the Direct File team, however, said the project largely succeeded in its goal of making it faster and easier for individuals to file their taxes. The IRS declined to comment.
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The IRS launched Direct File last year as a pilot in 12 states, tapping into a portion of the billions of dollars in modernization funds it received under the Inflation Reduction Act. The project expanded to 25 states this year, and more than doubled its total number of users.
Direct File users gave the platform higher favorability scores this year, and 86% of Direct File users said their experience with the platform helped increase their trust in government.
Despite those metrics, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress spent much of this year planning to eliminate Direct File.
The agency told states that taxpayers who used Direct File to file their taxes will no longer be able to access their returns through the platform. Instead, taxpayers can access a summary of their returns online through their IRS online accounts, or by submitting a form to request a full copy of their return by mail.
“Thank you for participating in IRS Direct File during Filing Season 2025, and for your collaboration and partnership to create a free, simple way for taxpayers to file their federal and state taxes,” the email states.
Most of the staff working on Direct File have left the government or have been terminated. Lawmakers, meanwhile, have passed legislation ordering the IRS to explore alternatives, after scrapping earlier plans to eliminate it.
Former IRS Commissioner Billy Long recently said at a tax conference in July that Direct File is “gone,” according to Bloomberg Tax.
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Critics of Direct File say it competes with software from tax-preparation companies, and that the IRS spent tens of millions of dollars to launch the platform. Former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told reporters last year that launching Direct File cost nearly $32 million.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that President Donald Trump signed into law this summer gave the Treasury Department $15 million to launch a task force and research alternatives to Direct File that would allow up to 70% of all taxpayers to file their tax returns for free. An earlier version of the bill would have required the IRS to eliminate Direct File.
The IRS launched a congressionally mandated survey in September, asking taxpayers for their thoughts on Direct File, as well as possible alternatives.
If a respondent said they were more likely to use a free online tax preparation program “paid for and operated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),” the survey provided a follow-up question, asking if they’d still be interested if “setting up and running the program is expected to have an initial cost to the federal government of at least $10-20 per return processed.”
A former IRS official who worked on Direct File told Federal News Network that the $10-20 cost estimate per return is accurate, assuming the platform was deployed to all 50 states.
In May, the IRS published the vast majority of Direct File’s code on GitHub. As a work of the U.S. government, Direct File is in the public domain.
The open-source software allows state governments to pick up where Direct File left off, and develop their own free, online platforms for state tax returns.
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