Tax filing deadline 2027.
April 15, and the dates before it.

The main date: Thursday, April 15, 2027

Individual income tax returns for tax year 2026 are due Thursday, April 15, 2027. It does not move: April 15 falls on a weekday and is not a federal holiday, so the weekend rule never comes into it.

Two things attach to that date, and they are easy to confuse. Filing and paying are separate deadlines. An extension of time to file (Form 4868) gives you until Friday, October 15, 2027 to hand in the return, but it does not give you until October to pay. If you owe tax, the payment is due on April 15 either way, and paying late costs interest and penalties from that date onward.

The extension is not free to ignore: if you file by October 15 without having sent a payment, you can still owe interest and a late-filing penalty for April through October. If you cannot pay the full amount, the estimated payments still count — a taxpayer who paid by the January 15 estimate can file in February and pay the rest on April 15.

Every 2027 date on the federal calendar

Two of those dates are new compared with what most people remember. In the 2027 draft of Publication 509, information returns go to the IRS by March 1 rather than in late January, and electronic filers get until March 31. The date for handing statements to recipients stays in early February. Check the current IRS tax calendar before you file — these are the draft figures for the 2026 tax year, and the IRS can still change them.

The rule that moves a date

One rule covers all of it: if a due date falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or a legal holiday, filing and furnishing on the next business day counts as timely. In 2027 that affects exactly one of the dates above — January 31 is a Sunday, so the statements to recipients go out by Monday, February 1 instead.

Two details that trip people up. A leap year does not extend a deadline: February 28 stays February 28 even in a leap year, and a date never rolls into March because the year is long. And the holiday that matters is the legal holiday where you file, not the national holiday list — for a return filed in a particular state, the state’s own legal holidays can move a date that the federal calendar would not.

What changed for 2027

• The reporting threshold went from $600 to $2,000. For payments made in tax years beginning after 2025, some information returns are only required from $2,000 — and that figure is adjusted for inflation starting in calendar year 2027, so the 2027 number has not been published yet.
• IRIS replaces FIRE for information returns. From the 2026 filing season, the Information Returns Intake System is the only way to submit information returns; the old FIRE system shuts down at the end of 2026. This affects whoever files 1099s, not most individual filers.
• The 2027 inflation adjustments are not out yet. The IRS published the 2026 figures in mid-October 2025; the 2027 set had not been published as of this writing. Published projections point to roughly a 3.2 % step-up, and some dollar amounts set by law in 2025 do not index at all.

The numbers that apply to the return you file in April 2027

Returns filed in April 2027 are for tax year 2026, so the official 2026 figures are the ones that apply. These come from the IRS revenue procedure for 2026, released in October 2025.

For comparison, the same figures a year earlier were $31,500, $15,750 and $23,625. The 10 % bracket starts at $12,400 for a single filer and $24,800 for a joint return, and the 37 % bracket starts at $640,600 and $768,700.

If your filing is not the standard one

• Farmers and fishermen can file from February 1 instead of April 15, provided the 2026 estimated tax was paid by January 15, 2027. The payment itself is still due April 15.
• Household employers file Schedule H with the return if they paid $3,000 or more in cash wages during 2026, and report federal unemployment tax on wages of $1,000 or more in a quarter.
• Tip income of $20 or more received in March 2026 has to be reported to the employer by April 12, 2027.
• Fiscal-year businesses file on the fifteenth day of the fourth month after their year ends, not on April 15.

The file work around it

Most of the documents for a return arrive as PDFs, and the ones you send in usually go out by email. Two things help: the PDF to text converter pulls the numbers out of a statement so you can read them without scrolling, and the PDF compressor gets a multi-megabyte document under a mail provider’s attachment limit. If the forms arrive blank, the form filler types into the fields and saves the result locally.

Everything in this workflow runs in your browser, so a tax return never has to sit on someone else’s server. Our file size limit table has the attachment ceilings for the mail providers you will be sending through, with the numbers measured rather than quoted.