Filing season will begin on Monday, Jan. 29, the Internal Revenue Service announced.
The final tax deadline will be Tuesday, April 17. (April 16 is Emancipation Day, a legal holiday in Washington, DC). The IRS expects nearly 155 million individual returns to be filed in 2018.
In 2017, the IRS began accepting returns on January 23; it set the date at January 29 this year to make sure that its key processing systems are ready, and to give it time to determine how late December’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will impact tax returns.
Many tax professionals and tax preparation chains will begin preparing returns before January 29, and many software companies are planning to accept them and then submit the returns when IRS systems open. Although the IRS will begin accepting both electronic and paper returns on January 29, paper returns will start to be processed later in mid-February as system updates continue.
The IRS said that it expects to issue more than 90 percent of refunds in less than three weeks, but did not that it legally cannot issue refunds claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit before mid-February.