Filing correctly is only half of what many households need from the IRS; the other half is a live person on the phone when something goes wrong. During the 2026 filing season, the agency fielded 48.1 million of those calls and put a telephone assistor on the line for just 9.9 million of them. For a household working through a notice, a stalled refund or a balance it cannot pay in full, that gap between dialing and getting answered translates directly into unresolved bills and unclaimed money.
The IRS Answered One Call in Five This Filing Season
Nearly every household that called the IRS last filing season faced roughly the same odds: about a one-in-five chance of reaching a telephone assistor. Millions who dialed in about a notice, a payment plan or a missing refund instead sat on hold, got disconnected, or gave up before speaking with anyone.
The National Taxpayer Advocate’s Fiscal Year 2027 Objectives Report to Congress, delivered to Congress in June 2026 by Advocate Erin M. Collins, put exact numbers on that experience: the IRS received 48.1 million calls during the filing season and telephone assistors answered 9.9 million of them, a 21% answer rate. A year earlier, the agency had received 50.2 million calls and answered 12.4 million, a 25% rate, with hold times averaging eight minutes rather than the 14 minutes recorded in 2026.
Collins’s report is blunt about what those averages meant for the households behind them. Taxpayers calling certain IRS lines, it says, “often could not reach a live employee despite repeated attempts.” The lines that failed most were not evenly distributed — some callers reached help quickly, while others calling about specific problems waited far longer than the overall average suggests.
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The Payment-Plan Line Fared Worse Than the Average
Among the ten most-called IRS telephone lines, the one handling payment arrangements performed worst of all. The Installment Agreement/Balance Due line — the number taxpayers dial when they cannot pay their full tax bill and need to set up a monthly plan — received about 3.4 million calls during the filing season. The IRS answered only 31% of them, and callers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s mid-year report.
That line matters beyond the spring filing deadline. Taxpayers who requested an automatic extension in April face the IRS’s mid-October extended filing deadline, and anyone who owes money after filing has to reach the same overloaded queue to arrange payments before penalties and interest keep accruing.
Reaching a person is not the only way to set up a plan. The IRS’s online payment agreement application lets qualifying individual taxpayers apply without calling at all: those who owe $50,000 or less in combined tax, penalties and interest can apply online for a long-term monthly plan and get an immediate answer, and those who owe less than $100,000 can apply for a short-term, 180-day plan with no setup fee. The tool cannot help everyone — business accounts still have to call, and some power-of-attorney arrangements require separate paperwork — but for the individual households most likely to be stuck behind a 45-minute hold, it is a working alternative to a line the IRS itself answered barely a third of the time.
Self-Service Tools Absorbed Millions of the Calls the Phone Lines Never Answered
The IRS leaned harder on self-service accounts and trackers as call answer rates fell, and taxpayers used them at a large scale. Households logged into their Individual Online Accounts nearly 121 million times during the filing season, using them to check refund status, view tax records, respond to notices, and in some cases update direct deposit information without ever picking up a phone.
The refund-tracking tool saw even heavier use. Taxpayers checked the status of their refunds through Where’s My Refund about 346 million times during the filing season, a 9% increase over the year before. The tool updates within 24 hours of an e-filed return or about four weeks after a paper return is mailed, and it remains the fastest way to confirm a refund’s status without waiting on hold.
Neither tool resolves every problem a phone call would; a taxpayer disputing a notice or negotiating a payment amount still needs a person eventually. But for the routine question of where a refund or a document stands, the self-service option answered instantly what the phone lines answered only about one time in five.
Not Every IRS Phone Line Performed the Same
The 21% overall answer rate obscures real variation between lines. Some queues performed close to what a functioning call center would deliver: the Practitioner Priority Service line, used mostly by tax professionals, answered 72% of its 1.0 million calls with an average eight-minute wait, and the Tax Law line answered 78% of its calls with just a four-minute wait. The Taxpayer Assistance Center appointment line answered 61% of its 1.2 million calls with a six-minute average hold — a fraction of the wait on the payment-plan line.
The IRS’s own published performance number does not capture the worst of these gaps. The agency reported a 73% Level of Service with an eight-minute average wait for the filing season, but that figure covers only its Accounts Management telephone lines, a measure that excludes the Installment Agreement/Balance Due line and other high-volume queues entirely. Two of the three highest-volume lines in the IRS’s own count, including the payment-plan line, fall outside that headline number.
Collins’s report attributes part of the shift to a deliberate tradeoff: to reduce a backlog of unprocessed paper correspondence, the IRS reallocated staff away from some phone lines during the filing season, a decision her report says “produced benefits for many taxpayers whose correspondence and account issues might otherwise have remained unresolved for extended periods,” even as it left other callers waiting longer for an answer.
When a Stalled Refund Needs More Than a Status Check
The self-service tools above show where a refund stands, but not what to do once it is delayed, reduced, or tied to a notice the IRS has sent. Households in that situation are the ones most likely to end up back on hold, working through the same overloaded phone lines described above. Sorting out a stalled refund usually comes down to paperwork and deadlines rather than a phone call — knowing which notice means what, and which form actually starts a refund trace.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit lays out a notice decoder alongside the refund-trace steps built around Form 3911 and a refund status tracker spreadsheet, covering what a stalled-refund case actually requires next.
Read the notice decoder and refund-trace steps in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit.
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