The tax you pay before you pay any tax
32 daysof your life, day and night, spent filing taxes the government could file for you.
Thirteen hours a year, sixty years running. Counted the way a jail sentence is counted — around the clock, not in working days — that is a month of your life, gone to paperwork about money you already earned and tax you already paid.
Sixty filings, one per year of adult life
- Age 20
- Age 21
- Age 22
- Age 23
- Age 24
- Age 25
- Age 26
- Age 27
- Age 28
- Age 29
- Age 30
- Age 31
- Age 32
- Age 33
- Age 34
- Age 35
- Age 36
- Age 37
- Age 38
- Age 39
- Age 40
- Age 41
- Age 42
- Age 43
- Age 44
- Age 45
- Age 46
- Age 47
- Age 48
- Age 49
- Age 50
- Age 51
- Age 52
- Age 53
- Age 54
- Age 55
- Age 56
- Age 57
- Age 58
- Age 59
- Age 60
- Age 61
- Age 62
- Age 63
- Age 64
- Age 65
- Age 66
- Age 67
- Age 68
- Age 69
- Age 70
- Age 71
- Age 72
- Age 73
- Age 74
- Age 75
- Age 76
- Age 77
- Age 78
- Age 79
Sixty Aprils. One for every year you file, from twenty until you die. Every one of them already crossed out.
The part that should end the argument
Your employer already sent the IRS your W-2. Your bank already sent your interest. Your broker already sent your gains. The agency has the numbers before you sit down — and it makes you type them in again, or pay a company to type them in for you.
Thirty-six countries do it the other way. Sweden sends a finished return you approve by text. Japan handles most employees so completely they never file at all. This is not a hard problem. It is a solved problem that America is paying not to solve.
of your life, day and night, spent filing taxes
IRS taxpayer burden model (13 hrs/return, TY2024) via NTU Foundation, over 60 filings from age 20 to 79.
Counted as continuous 24-hour days — the same way a jail sentence is counted. Measured in working days it is far larger; we use the smaller, stricter number.
the average American spends filing, every year
IRS taxpayer burden model, tax year 2024, printed in the Form 1040 instructions; compiled by NTU Foundation.
TY2025 estimate eases to 12 hours.
the average American pays to file, every year
IRS taxpayer burden model, TY2024, via NTU Foundation.
in filing fees over a lifetime
$290 x 60 filings, in constant dollars.
About $102,500 if that money were invested instead at a 5% real return. The 5% assumption is ours.
what the IRS itself estimated it costs to do your taxes for you, per year
IRS Report to Congress, May 2023: $249M to run Direct File at scale, against 25 million users.
The high end of the IRS's own range.
if you work for yourself
IRS burden model, 24 hrs/return for filers with business income (29% of filers), TY2024: 24 x 60 = 1,440 hours = exactly 60 days.
True for the TY2024 estimate. The TY2025 estimate of 21 hours gives 52 days.
America spends on individual income tax filing every year
NTU Foundation, February 2026, Table 1 — individual income tax only.
Equivalent to confining about 243,000 people around the clock for a full year, every year.
of the 70% of taxpayers eligible for IRS Free File actually used it
GAO-22-105236, 2022.
of those hours that pre-filling can actually take back
Goodman, Lim, Sacerdote & Whitten, NBER w30008 (2022): 42-48% of returns are accurately pre-populatable with current information returns.
Pre-filling does not zero the burden out. We say so.
Pre-fill my return
Direct File was killed on one argument: that only 296,531 people used it, so nobody wants it. That is a claim about how many of us there are. This is how we answer it.
We ask for a ZIP code because a number means nothing to a congressional office until it is a number in their district. Email and ZIP are all we need. We do not sell anything and there is nothing to buy.
And build the replacement
Signing is the political half. The other half is making the software exist, in public, where lobbying cannot reach it — a $50,000,000 open prize for a filing system that serves every American at once.
The money is not raised yet. That is stated plainly on the page.