Income Tax Refunds Issued (Table V)

Table V reports the dollar value of federal income tax refunds issued by the IRS each business day, split between individual and business refunds and between payment methods — paper checks versus electronic funds transfer (EFT), i.e. direct deposit. The month-to-date and fiscal-year-to-date columns make it easy to compare the pace of refunds against prior years.

Refund activity is highly seasonal: it surges from late January through May as tax filing season plays out, and the daily figures here are the fastest public indicator of how quickly the IRS is processing returns in a given year. Every refund is cash leaving the government, so these amounts also show up as withdrawals in Table II and reduce the Treasury General Account balance (Table I). Refund data is available back to 2005 via the date picker above.