Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026, is the last day of IRS postponement relief for people affected by the terrorist attacks in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Filing and payment deadlines that fell between Sept. 30, 2025 and Sept. 30, 2026 were pushed to today for covered taxpayers. The IRS has posted no extension in its September releases, so what was postponed comes due today.
Where the deadline stands on its final day
The relief comes from Notice 2025-53, announced in IRS release IR-2025-97 on Sept. 30, 2025. The release says affected individuals and businesses “have until Sept. 30, 2026, to file returns and pay any taxes that are due during this period.”
The IRS newsroom’s list of September releases, read in the early hours of Sept. 30, shows nothing on Israel after that announcement. The newest entry is IR-2026-115 from Sept. 28, about installment payments on farmland sales. The list has no notice extending the postponement. The IRS could still post one late in the day, so the newsroom and the disaster relief page are where any change would appear.
Last year’s renewal arrived on the final day of the previous relief period. IR-2025-97 is dated Sept. 30, 2025, the same day the earlier postponement to Sept. 30, 2025 was set to end. That history explains why a late announcement cannot be ruled out, but it is a fact about timing and not a promise. The IRS has said nothing about a further extension.
Who the relief covers
Notice 2025-53 covers taxpayers affected by terroristic action in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza throughout 2024 and 2025. The IRS says it automatically identifies taxpayers whose principal residence or principal place of business is in the covered area, based on prior returns. That automatic treatment reaches people and businesses located there.
Taxpayers who are affected but not located in the area are handled differently. The release says they may contact the IRS disaster hotline to request relief. The number is 866-562-5227 for callers in the United States and 267-941-1000 for callers abroad. The relief is not a blanket rule for every American with ties to Israel. It applies to taxpayers the notice describes as affected.
Which filings and payments moved to Sept. 30
The postponement reaches “various tax filing and payment deadlines that occurred or will occur during the period from Sept. 30, 2025, through Sept. 30, 2026,” and moves them to Sept. 30, 2026. The IRS describes the covered items as a wide range of deadlines for filing federal returns, making tax payments and performing other time-sensitive tax-related actions.
The release read for this article does not list each deadline by name. For an affected household or business, the practical effect is a single date. A return or a payment that would have been due anywhere in that year is now due today, if the taxpayer was covered.
The release’s own title adds that “additional relief may be available,” and it points readers to the notice for details. The pages read for this article do not describe what that additional relief is, so the postponement of filing and payment dates is the only relief confirmed here.
Three notices and a date that has moved twice
The current end date is the latest in a string. The IRS release refers back to Notices 2023-71 and 2024-72, which provided earlier periods of relief running back to the attacks that began Oct. 7, 2023. The IRS disaster relief page, last updated Sept. 16, 2026, lists an earlier release, IR-2024-252, under which 2023 and 2024 returns and payments were due Sept. 30, 2025.
The 2024 release moved the date to Sept. 30, 2025, and the 2025 notice moved it to Sept. 30, 2026. Nothing in the pages read shows a fourth notice, and the IRS has not said whether it plans one. A reader who assumes another renewal is coming has no source for it.
What happens after Sept. 30
The release describes no relief beyond Sept. 30, 2026, and it does not spell out what follows the postponed date. Once the postponement ends, the ordinary rules for late filing and late payment govern anything a covered taxpayer has not yet filed or paid.
The release gives the disaster hotline as the contact for taxpayers seeking the relief. Because the deadline is today, a call to 866-562-5227 is the direct route to the IRS on that question.
The end of the relief matters only for items still outstanding. A covered taxpayer who has already filed and paid within the postponed window is not affected by the date passing.
The IRS’s own wording is the authority
The controlling record is the IRS’s Sept. 30, 2025 announcement of Notice 2025-53, which fixes the postponed period as Sept. 30, 2025 through Sept. 30, 2026, names Israel, the West Bank and Gaza as the covered area, and lists both phone numbers. As of the newsroom listing read before publication, that record has not been changed.
A refund check that was issued but never arrived
A refund that was issued but never reached its owner is a different problem from a missed filing date, and it has its own paper trail. The kit below is for people whose refund check was lost or never arrived.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit is a 13-page kit that sets out the refund-trace steps for Form 3911 and a notice decoder for the letters that can follow.
Open The IRS Refund Recovery Kit to read the Form 3911 refund-trace steps →
This article was written with AI assistance and its dates and phone numbers were checked against the IRS pages linked above.
