About one in five phone calls placed to the Internal Revenue Service during the 2026 filing season reached a live employee, and callers who did get through waited an average of 14 minutes, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s own account of the season. That marks a sharp drop from the prior filing season, when the agency answered one in four calls with an average eight-minute wait. The comparison appears inside a report describing an IRS that processed nearly 139 million returns without major incident for most filers, even as taxpayers who needed to reach a person by phone had a measurably harder time doing it than the year before.
A “Level of Service” Number That Leaves Out the Busiest Lines
The IRS’s headline phone metric, called Level of Service, counts only calls to its Accounts Management telephone lines, and by that narrower measure the 2026 filing season looked comparatively strong: a 73% answer rate with an average eight-minute wait. That measure excludes calls routed to automated systems, calls where the taxpayer hangs up before reaching a queue, and, more consequentially, two of the three highest-volume telephone lines the agency operates, both of which sit outside the Accounts Management category entirely.
The overall call volume actually fell during the 2026 season, from 50.2 million calls the year before to 48.1 million, yet the share answered fell as well, from 25% to 21%. Fewer calls did not translate into shorter waits or a higher answer rate, a pattern that runs against the assumption that phone congestion tracks mainly with how many people call in a given year.
Those two excluded lines carried heavy volume and performed far worse than the official measure implies. The Installment Agreement/Balance Due line, which taxpayers call to arrange payment plans when they cannot pay their full tax bill, received 3.4 million calls and answered only 31% of them, with an average wait of 45 minutes, nearly six times longer than the Accounts Management average the agency publicizes.
Free download: What each refund-status message means, the direct-deposit and paper-check paths, and when to follow up with the IRS. Get the free refund delay decision tree.
The Identity-Theft Line Adds a Wait Onto an Already Two-Year Case
The third heavily called line outside the Accounts Management measure is the Taxpayer Protection Program line, which taxpayers dial when a return has been frozen during processing over suspected identity theft and the filer must verify identity before any refund is released. That line received 2.4 million calls and answered just 19% of them, with an average 20-minute wait, a lower answer rate than the balance-due line and nearly four times worse than the number the IRS features publicly.
The delay on that phone line compounds a wait that was already long before anyone dialed. The same review of the 2026 filing season reports that the average time to close an identity theft victim assistance case stood at 600 days, or roughly 20 months, meaning a caller struggling to reach the verification line by phone is often already deep into a refund delay measured in years rather than weeks.
Fewer alternatives existed for taxpayers who wanted to skip the phone entirely. The number of fully staffed Taxpayer Assistance Centers, where a taxpayer can raise an identity-verification problem in person, fell to 42 during the 2026 filing season, down from 102 the year before, narrowing the in-person option for the callers least able to navigate an online account or tolerate a long hold.
That combination lands hardest on taxpayers who lack a comfortable digital workaround, since the phone line remains the primary route to authenticate identity once a return is flagged. A caller who cannot get through on a given attempt is not simply delayed by a day; the return stays frozen until the verification step is completed, so a string of unanswered calls extends a refund hold that was already running far longer than the agency’s routine processing time.
A Falling Answer Rate That Was Partly a Deliberate Trade
The decline was not purely a matter of insufficient staffing. According to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s objectives report, the IRS deliberately reduced its Level of Service targets on the Accounts Management lines to redirect staff toward a backlog of paper correspondence and paper-filed returns, a trade the agency pursued partly at the recommendation of the Advocate’s own office in prior years.
The trade produced a mixed outcome rather than a clean improvement. Correspondence and paper-inventory cases that might otherwise have sat unresolved for extended periods moved forward, but the phone lines outside Accounts Management, including the balance-due and identity-theft verification lines, absorbed none of that benefit and instead recorded some of the worst answer rates in the report. Live assistors overall answered about 20% fewer calls than during the prior filing season, a decline that reflects a staffing choice as much as a service failure.
The report therefore credits the IRS with a largely successful filing season for the millions of returns that moved through automated processing, while documenting, in the same pages, an answer rate on its highest-volume specialty phone lines that fell to roughly one in five calls, a gap between the taxpayers the system serves smoothly and the ones who need to speak with a person to get unstuck.
Resolving a Notice Without Reaching a Person
None of the phone statistics above change what a taxpayer is actually supposed to do when a refund stalls and the relevant line answers only one call in five. The forms and steps that move a stuck refund forward without waiting on hold rarely appear on the notice that caused the delay in the first place.
The IRS Refund Recovery Kit is a 13-page kit built around a refund status tracker spreadsheet and the refund-trace steps under Form 3911 for pursuing a delayed refund without depending on a phone line to answer.
See the refund-trace steps and tracker spreadsheet in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
