For most of the country, tax deadlines closed months ago and will not reopen until next spring. Households connected to three Native American reservations are working from a different calendar entirely. Three separate IRS disaster declarations — covering the Crow Tribe of Montana, the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, and the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona — all point to the same date: September 28, 2026. That is when a backlog of federal tax filings and payments finally comes due for residents and businesses tied to those three tribal nations.
Three Storms, Three Declarations, One Shared Deadline
The Internal Revenue Service issued MT-2026-04 for the Crow Tribe of Montana after a severe winter storm and straight-line winds struck the reservation in southcentral Montana between December 17 and December 19, 2025. Individuals and businesses on the Crow Reservation now have until September 28, 2026, to file most federal returns and pay taxes that would otherwise have been due earlier in the year.
A second declaration, MT-2026-03, covers the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, hit by the same category of severe winter storm and straight-line winds. The postponed deadline lands on the identical date, so a household or small business tied to Fort Peck is working against the same calendar as one on the Crow Reservation.
The third, AZ-2026-01, covers the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona, where the qualifying disaster was severe storms and flooding rather than winter weather. Despite the different cause, the federal disaster declaration that triggered the relief produced the same September 28, 2026, postponement. All three declarations still appear as live, current relief on the IRS’s disaster relief index, which the agency last updated September 11, 2026.
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What Actually Moves to the New Date
The postponement is not limited to the annual income tax return. For the Crow Tribe relief, the IRS extended the September 28 deadline to individual, corporate, and estate and trust income tax returns; partnership and S-corporation returns; estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer tax returns; annual returns for tax-exempt organizations; and employment and certain excise tax returns with an original or extended due date falling on or after December 17, 2025.
Estimated income tax payments normally due during that window move too, and the IRS will not assess a penalty for missing a quarterly estimated payment as long as it arrives by September 28, 2026. Quarterly payroll and certain excise tax returns that would normally be due January 31, April 30 or July 31 shift to the same date. Payroll and excise tax deposit penalties for the short window between December 17, 2025, and January 2, 2026, are waived as long as the deposits were made by January 2.
A Refund Window That Doesn’t Quietly Shrink
A postponed filing deadline can create a separate problem: the multi-year clock the IRS uses to decide how far back a refund or credit can reach. Under the recently enacted Disaster Related Extension of Deadlines Act, a federal postponement tied to a declared disaster now counts as an extension for that refund-limitation calculation, not just for filing. In practice, that keeps the refund window open for the same stretch of time the filing deadline was pushed back, so a household that waits until September to file a return does not lose part of what it could otherwise claim.
The Casualty Loss Election Most Filers Never Use
Households and businesses in any of the three covered areas can claim a casualty loss from the qualifying disaster on either their 2025 return or their 2024 return, whichever produces the better result, and they get extra time to decide. For individual taxpayers, the deadline to make that election is October 15, 2026 — six months past the regular filing deadline, without regard to any extension. See IRS Publication 547 for how the election works. Anyone claiming the loss needs to write the FEMA declaration number tied to their disaster, 4915-DR for the Crow Tribe relief, directly on the return. Separately, some retirement account holders in a covered area may qualify for a special disaster distribution that skips the usual 10% early-withdrawal tax and can be spread across three years of income under Form 8915-F.
Automatic for Some, a Phone Call for Everyone Else
The IRS says it automatically identifies taxpayers with an address of record inside a covered disaster area and applies the postponed deadlines without any request. That does not cover everyone affected. A taxpayer who lives or runs a business outside the mapped disaster area — but whose accountant, bank records or business operations sit inside it — has to call the IRS Special Services line directly to request the same relief, since the system will not catch that connection automatically. Tax preparers handling ten or more affected clients outside the disaster area have a separate bulk-request process rather than calling client by client. The exact boundaries of each covered area, along with the FEMA disaster number attached to it, are spelled out in the IRS’s own announcement for the Crow Tribe relief, the document that anchors all three September 28 postponements.
What a stalled refund actually means
Each status message and each notice points to a different cause, and each cause has its own next step.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit includes a 13-page kit, a notice decoder and the refund-trace steps (Form 3911).
Read the notice decoder in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
