People who skipped a tax return and are owed a refund do not have forever to claim it. The IRS says taxpayers usually have three years to file and claim a refund, and if they do not, the money becomes the property of the U.S. Treasury.

The warning came in a March 2026 IRS release about tax year 2022, when more than 1.3 million people had unclaimed refunds worth about $1.2 billion. The deadline for those 2022 refunds was April 15, 2026, and it has now passed.

How the three-year clock works

The IRS refund page says the last day to claim a credit or refund is generally the later of two dates: three years after the return was filed, or two years after the tax was paid. The page adds that no credit or refund is available if the claim is not filed within that window.

The window is counted year by year. For tax year 2022 the cutoff was April 15, 2026, which is the date the IRS gave in its release. The same three-year rule applies to every later year, so a skipped return from 2023 or 2024 is on its own countdown, even though the IRS has not published a total of unclaimed 2023 refunds.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent office inside the IRS, calls this cutoff the Refund Statute Expiration Date. A return filed after it will not produce a check. The service says any overpayment “is forfeited by law” and cannot be applied to another tax year.

Anyone who skipped a return for a year in the last few years, and had tax withheld or paid, is the person this rule is aimed at. The question for them is simple: which year is it, and has the three-year window closed yet? A refund for a year with a window still open can be claimed by filing the missing return. A refund for a year with a closed window cannot.

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What the 2022 numbers show about who waits too long

The IRS estimated that the median unclaimed 2022 refund was $686. That is real money, and anyone who had not filed a 2022 return by April 15, 2026 lost it.

Credits can be part of the money. The same release says the Earned Income Tax Credit for 2022 was worth up to $6,935 for taxpayers with qualifying children, and workers with no qualifying children could still claim it with income under $16,480 ($22,610 for joint filers). A person with low wages and no filing obligation may therefore still be owed a refund.

The IRS also said a taxpayer’s 2022 funds could be held if returns for 2023 and 2024 had not been filed. In other words, an unfiled return for a later year can hold up money owed for an earlier one.

The TAS notice adds a warning that matters for older households with scattered paperwork. The IRS does not generally tell people before the deadline arrives, so tracking it falls to the taxpayer. The same page says a letter called a CP 81 means the IRS has payments or credits on file for a year but no return, and that the steps on the notice are worth following.

The exceptions that can add time

The IRS refund page lists situations that stretch the window. A written agreement with the IRS to extend the assessment period adds six months to the limit. Taxpayers in a presidentially declared disaster area may have up to one additional year. Combat-zone service can add time, and a claim for bad debt or worthless securities gets seven years from the return’s due date.

Those exceptions are narrow. A taxpayer who simply forgot to file a return for a year does not get extra time because of them. The TAS page lists a few more, including financial disability, and refers readers to IRS Publication 556 for the details.

Getting the missing paperwork together

The 2022 release walks through where old records come from. Missing W-2s, 1098s, 1099s or 5498s can be requested from the employer, bank or other payer. The IRS also says Get Transcript Online gives a free wage and income transcript, and for many taxpayers that is “by far the quickest and easiest option.” A request by mail on Form 4506-T, which can also be used to ask for proof that no return was filed, can take several weeks.

A transcript can also be ordered by mail through the IRS tax records page, which says it arrives in five to ten calendar days at the address the IRS has on file. The automated phone line for that request is 800-908-9946. Free tax help for people over 60 is available through the IRS’s volunteer program, according to the TAS page.

The practical order is to find the year, find the paperwork, then file. Because the three-year window is counted from a date that is already behind the taxpayer, waiting only shrinks the time left.

Never filed for a year that might have a refund?

A skipped return is easy to put off, and the penalty is the refund itself. Once three years pass, the IRS says the money goes to the Treasury, and a year that looked fine in January can be closed by the next filing season.

The IRS Refund Recovery Kit explains the 3-year refund deadline in plain steps, so a late filer can work out which years are still open. It also includes a notice decoder for letters like the CP 81, and Part 4 of the guide, “Why It Stalled: The Notice Decoder,” covers what each kind of IRS letter is asking for.

Get the 3-year refund deadline guide and notice decoder for unfiled years →

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.