Time until Tax Day

Tax Day is the deadline for filing a federal income tax return in the United States, ordinarily 15 April. The real date moves in some years: when the 15th falls on a weekend, or on Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia, the deadline slides to the next business day, and disaster declarations can push it further for affected states. This countdown uses the standard 15 April, so check the IRS date for the current year before relying on it.

The practical lead time is longer than the countdown suggests. Employers and brokerages send out the forms needed to file from late January into February, and a return that depends on a partnership or trust statement can wait longer than that. Anyone who cannot file in time may request an automatic extension of the filing deadline, but that does not extend the time to pay, and interest and penalties run from the original date regardless. The first quarterly estimated payment of the new year is also due on or near the same day, which catches out people who are newly self-employed. State returns usually follow the federal date, though not always. This is a deadline rather than an occasion, so the working-day figure on this page is the more useful of the two totals.

Other countries put the line elsewhere. Canada asks most individuals to file by 30 April, the United Kingdom takes online self assessment returns until 31 January, and Australia's standard lodgement date is 31 October. Even the federal American date is not quite uniform, since Massachusetts and Maine observe Patriots' Day and their residents get until the next business day after it. The assumption that causes trouble is that a postmark settles everything: an electronically filed return is timed by when it is transmitted and accepted, and a payment scheduled for the deadline can still fail on the day if the account details are wrong.

The next one falls on Thursday, 15 April 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The modern federal income tax began with the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, and the first filing deadline was 1 March. It moved to 15 March in 1918 and to 15 April under the code revision that took effect in 1955, on the reasoning that an extra month would spread the work of processing returns across a longer period. It has stayed there since, with every adjustment written into the rule that surrounds the date rather than into the date itself.

One of those adjustments catches people out every few years. Emancipation Day is a public holiday in the District of Columbia on 16 April, marking the freeing of enslaved people there in 1862, and federal law treats a holiday in the district as a holiday for filing purposes. When it falls on or next to a weekend it pushes the national deadline back, which is how a deadline that is nominally 15 April has landed on the 17th and the 18th in recent years.