Carroll County lost power lines and roads to straight-line winds. Parts of Marion County flooded. By the time the storms that started on August 11 finished moving through Indiana, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had a disaster number attached to the damage, and the IRS had a new deadline for the people living with the cleanup.
Who Gets the Extra Time
The Internal Revenue Service announced on September 2 that individuals and businesses in 21 Indiana counties now have until February 1, 2027, to file many federal returns and make tax payments that would otherwise have come due between August 11, 2026, and that date. The relief follows FEMA’s disaster declaration (number 4933-DR) covering severe storms, straight-line winds, tornadoes and flooding.
The 21 counties are Carroll, Dearborn, Decatur, Delaware, Fayette, Franklin, Hamilton, Hancock, Henry, Lake, LaPorte, Madison, Marion, Morgan, Porter, Pulaski, Randolph, Rush, Tipton, Union and Wayne. That list runs from Lake and Porter in the northwest corner near Gary, down through Marion County and Indianapolis, and out to Dearborn and Union on the Ohio border — a wide diagonal stretch of the state rather than one isolated region. If your address is inside one of them, the IRS applies the relief automatically based on your address of record — there’s no form to file and no phone call needed to claim it.
Taxpayers outside those 21 counties can still qualify in a narrower case: if the records you need to meet a tax deadline are held by an accountant, payroll company or bank located inside the disaster area. Those taxpayers won’t get the postponement automatically — the IRS says they need to call its Special Services line directly and explain the situation so the relief can be applied to their account by hand.
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What The Feb. 1 Date Actually Covers
The postponement is broad. It reaches many individual and business income tax returns, partnership and S-corporation returns, estate and trust returns, and certain employment and excise tax filings that would have been due in that window. It also covers quarterly estimated income-tax payments due on or after August 11 — so if you’re self-employed or a small-business owner in one of these counties and had a payment due September 15, that payment now rides along with everything else to February 1.
If you already had a valid extension to file your 2025 federal income tax return, that filing deadline also moves to February 1. That detail matters because it’s easy to assume the whole 2025 tax year got pushed back. It didn’t.
The Carve-Out Homeowners Need To Know
Here’s the part that trips people up: the tax you actually owed on your 2025 return was due April 15, 2026, and that payment deadline is not covered by this relief. Only the paperwork — the extended filing itself — got the new date. If you owed money on your 2025 return and didn’t pay it by April 15, interest and penalties on that specific balance kept running through the storm, the flooding, and everything since. Don’t let the broader postponement lull you into thinking an old balance got forgiven along with it.
Payroll and excise tax deposits get their own narrower window: penalties on deposits due between August 11 and August 25 are waived only if the deposit was actually made by August 26. Miss that shorter date and the postponement doesn’t reach back to cover it. For a small business running payroll through the disaster and short on cash, that 15-day grace window is a lot less forgiving than the headline February 1 date, and it’s worth flagging to whoever handles your payroll deposits now rather than finding out at tax time.
If You’re Already In A Payment Plan
Households with an existing IRS installment agreement don’t have to worry about a storm-related missed payment defaulting the agreement. The IRS says those agreements stay in place through the postponement period. The catch is that interest and any late-payment penalties keep accruing in the background regardless — the protection is against default, not against the balance quietly growing. Anyone who wants to pause automatic withdrawals tied to an agreement needs to contact the IRS or their bank directly; it doesn’t happen on its own.
Claiming The Loss On Your Taxes
Taxpayers with uninsured or unreimbursed casualty losses from the storms can choose to claim the loss on either their 2025 or their 2026 federal return, whichever produces the better result once the numbers are run. Anyone filing that way needs to include the FEMA declaration number, 4933-DR, on the return — check DisasterAssistance.gov for the full record of the declaration. The IRS is also waiving its usual fee for copies of past tax returns or transcripts for affected taxpayers, which matters for anyone who lost paperwork to flooding and now has to reconstruct records for an insurance claim or a lender.
Separately, qualified disaster-relief payments from government agencies — money that helps cover living expenses, home repairs or replacing damaged property — generally aren’t counted as taxable income, so accepting that kind of assistance shouldn’t create a surprise tax bill next spring. The IRS also notes that certain retirement-plan and IRA distributions taken because of the disaster may qualify for additional relief, so anyone tapping a 401(k) or IRA to cover storm damage should ask their plan administrator whether the withdrawal qualifies before assuming the usual early-distribution rules apply.
Free Help Is Available Before You Pay For It
Anyone in the affected counties working through this alone should know that free tax preparation exists through IRS Free File, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE), and AARP Tax-Aide — all before paying a preparer to sort out an extended, disaster-affected return. Taxpayers who live outside the 21 counties but believe they still qualify because their records are held inside one can call the IRS Special Services line to check. The full county list, filing details and casualty-loss rules are in the IRS’s own release, and it’s worth reading directly rather than relying on a secondhand summary, since the April 15 payment carve-out is easy to miss.
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.
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