Marion County, which holds Indianapolis, is one of 21 Indiana counties where the Internal Revenue Service has pushed federal tax deadlines to February 1, 2027 after severe storms, straight-line winds, tornadoes and flooding that began August 11. Taxpayers in those counties do not file a form, send a letter or make a call to get the postponement. The IRS says it works out who qualifies on its own, by where the taxpayer is located.
The announcement, release IN-2026-01 of September 2, turns on two questions that sound simple and are not: which counties are in, and what the agency means by automatic.
Carroll through Wayne: the counties the IRS reads off a return
The covered area is the set of counties listed in the IRS release, which carries the federal disaster declaration number 4933-DR. Counted from the live release, they are Carroll, Dearborn, Decatur, Delaware, Fayette, Franklin, Hamilton, Hancock, Henry, Lake, LaPorte, Madison, Marion, Morgan, Porter, Pulaski, Randolph, Rush, Tipton, Union and Wayne. That is 21 counties, and no others are in the release. A county missing from the list, however close to a storm path, is outside the postponement unless a later IRS notice adds it.
The list in the release itself, and not a news summary or a neighbor’s recollection, is the reference to check, because a disaster list can be revised by a later notice. As of the read made for this article on October 5, the release still shows the same 21.
What “automatic” means: the address on record
The release says it in one sentence: “The IRS automatically identifies taxpayers located in the covered disaster area and applies filing and payment relief.” The sentence does not define “located.” The IRS’s general disaster assistance page does, at least for who counts as affected: individuals whose principal residence is in a covered disaster area, and business entities or sole proprietors whose principal place of business is there.
How the IRS finds those people was spelled out in a reminder for a different set of disasters. In IR-2023-174, issued September 19, 2023 for California, Alabama and Georgia, the agency wrote that “as long as their address of record is in a disaster-area locality, individual and business taxpayers automatically get the extra time, without having to ask for it.” That is a 2023 statement about other storms, not the Indiana release, but it is the IRS’s own description of the mechanism, and it explains the title’s phrase: the match is made on the address the agency already holds.
The consequence is practical. A taxpayer whose address on IRS record is in a covered county gets the relief without contact. The Indiana release addresses the opposite case, and only that one: taxpayers who “reside or have a business located outside the covered disaster area” are told to call the IRS Special Services number, 866-562-5227, to request the relief. It does not separately describe a resident whose IRS address is out of date.
Who the Special Services line is for
The same release lists who the call is meant to reach: taxpayers whose home or business is outside the covered area, and practitioners who need relief for ten or more clients, who are pointed to a bulk-request process instead of individual calls. The 866-562-5227 line is not an application for taxpayers inside the 21 counties, because the IRS has already done the matching for them.
That division of labor answers a question a taxpayer in a neighboring county might ask. Living close to a covered county is not a criterion in the release or on the disaster assistance page, which tie relief to the principal residence or principal place of business. The same page adds one more group: taxpayers not located in a disaster area whose records needed to meet a deadline are maintained in one.
Three things the automatic relief carries with it
The release attaches three further provisions to the same county list. First, a taxpayer who gets a late-filing or late-payment penalty notice with an original due date inside the postponement period should call the telephone number on the notice to have the IRS abate the penalty. Second, affected taxpayers in a federally declared disaster area can claim disaster-related casualty losses on their federal return for either the year the event occurred or the prior year. Third, the IRS “will waive the usual fees for requests for copies of previously filed tax returns for affected taxpayers.”
That last provision comes with a labeling rule, and it is where the declaration number matters. The release instructs taxpayers to put the assigned FEMA number, 4933-DR, “in bold letters at the top of Form 4506, Request for Copy of Tax Return or Form 4506-T, Request for Transcript of Tax Return, as appropriate.” The number ties the request to the Indiana declaration.
For the county list, the declaration number and these provisions, the controlling text is the release itself, dated September 2, 2026 and numbered IN-2026-01, and the contact it prints is the IRS Special Services line, 866-562-5227.
When a refund goes astray after a move
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit is written for taxpayers whose refund never arrived, arrived reduced, or is sitting behind an identity-verification or offset notice, including households that have moved since they last filed. It is a separate paid product, not tied to the Indiana relief, not from the IRS, and it files nothing.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit includes the refund-trace steps for Form 3911, a notice decoder, a refund status tracker spreadsheet and the 3-year refund deadline, assembled for tracking down a refund that went missing.
Walk through the Form 3911 refund-trace steps in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit →
This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor; the county list, quotations and dates were checked against the IRS release and the IRS pages linked above.
