IOW, almost 60 hours before the deadline! Wahoo!
(Any remaining slackers out there I can justly look down upon and sneer?)
My CPA is putting the final touches on mine.
Holy shit! Seriously! I think my wife has forgotten to do the taxes. I’ll have to remind her when she gets up from her nap. Thanks for the reminder!
What is the “mailbox” of which you speak Mr. OP?
E-filed on 3/19 for me. Usually done by late Feb, but I was out of the country for 3 weeks from mid Feb. On April 15th the IRS will auto-debit my checking account for the couple percent shortfall between my actual taxes and my estimated payments to date.
Federal refund hit my bank on Feb. 17 (looks down and sneers 
)
Oh, taxes? I think my wife filed in February. She enjoys it. I enjoy doing something she doesn’t like to do as a thank-you.
Sunday afternoon, about 3pm Central time. We pay quarterly, and it is always complex, so whew! glad it is over.
For all you just-in-timers, keep in mind that the new USPS policy is that mail is postmarked when it reaches a sorting facility, not at your local post office, so it can take an extra day or two to get postmarked. In other words, think of today as the deadline if you’re mailing it, not the 15th.
When was it submitted? It’s been three weeks and I’m still waiting for my federal refund. My state refund arrived two days after it was submitted!
Turnaround times are much faster for e-filed than paper-filed. Turnaround times are fastest for returns filed in early Feb and only get slower as you get closer to filing on Apr 15 itself.
Why so early?
IRS I e-file but state & local always go into the mailbox on the 15th. As an added bonus, twice I’ve been able to do that in another country just so it takes a couple extra days to get to them. Local I always owe some nominal amount, this year will be a lot but still < $20 (some years it’s under $5). I’ve had them not cash the check until June. It’s usually the only check I mail all year.
Once upon a time, I was listening to the radio and some IRS person admitted that they had way too many envelopes and too little time to bother checking postmarks so, provided you were within a day or so, you were probably fine. Not something I’d make choices on but maybe something to ease the guilt if you’re a smidge late. I file electronically these days anyway.
I usually get mine done in the final hours up to the deadline but, this year, wasn’t really sure if we’d owe or get a refund and didn’t want to find out that I needed to pay a chunk with hours left on the clock. So I filed in the first week of February. Turns out we were getting money back so it’s here and spent at this point.
On the other hand, the IRS gets an avalanche of envelopes over the next two weeks. Unless you’re seriously late, I highly doubt anyone is looking at postmarks. (not legal or financial advice, just a speculation.)
It was e-filed on March 17th, and I expected to see it deposited by now.
We got our refund in early March. First time in a few years we have gotten a refund, otherwise I file later.
Postmarks: All of the paperwork, including envelopes, is scanned into a computer. Then all the paper is shredded. I bet the computer can read postmarks just fine.
With the flail about USPS not postmarking stuff until a couple / few days after it’s in their physical possession I’d be rather leery of assuming “nobody is looking at postmarks” in the era of AI.
Yeah. My habit back in the day was to rough out the taxes in early Jan by referring to my year end paystubs and December investment statements. If it looked like I was getting a refund I’d finish them for real as soon as I had my investment 1099s, usually 2nd week in Feb. If it was a refund, file that ASAP. Conversely, if I owed, sit on it until Apr 15th or a couple days before, then snail-mail the return & accompanying check.
Now that we have e-file and ACH transfers both ways and I pay estimated taxes, not W2 withholding, I compute the taxes once for real as soon as I have the final 1099s, normally Feb 15. Then I file immediately. If I’m due a refund, it comes quickly via ACH to my checking account. If I owe them, I arrange in advance for them to debit my account on Apr 15.
The end result is I get any refunds as soon as practical, and pay any taxes due as late as possible. I try to owe them a little bit of money every year. Sometimes I miss high or low. As said above, this year I owe them a couple percent more tax than I’ve already paid. So I got pretty close.
Email stating my Federal return was accepted came on 1/30, filed via CashApp a few days prior to that.
I did my tax returns back in February. As I own money to both the IRS and the state, I haven’t yet filed them; I’m going to do that tomorrow.
E-filed mine back in mid/late March. Having relocated from VA back to PR I had to do a bit more of a complicated song-and-dance since I have overlapping taxation status.
Have in my hand the envelope of my late father’s last tax return, which for the last couple years we had to revert to paper since he let all his ID’s expire and we now had to make sure we had all documents in order. Will drop it off at the late-hours PO on my way home.
I agree that is surprising.
At the risk of asking a dumb question …
Did you receive the IRS response via email and/or through your tax app that the IRS had “accepted” your return? Typically that email arrives within minutes of submitting your return. At worst it arrives the next day.
I ask because the IRS initially rejected my e-filing about an hour after I sent it in. Because I had used last year’s “Identity Protection PIN” (IPP), forgetting that they change every year. So I went and retrieved my new IPP from the IRS website, entered it in my return, e-filed it again, and got the accepted email back a few minutes later.
Bottom line: It’d suck to have thought you filed on 3/17 but the IRS spit it back at you unnoticed by you.