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How Long Did it Take to Get Your Tax Refund?

Tracking tax refunds is quite the adventure this year. Readers are reporting all sorts of data points in how long it takes to get your tax refund back [1].

Originally the IRS started out with an aggressive one week turnaround on tax refunds for efiled returns [2].

However, once we got started, they announced a one week tax refund delay [3].

But then it got worse and after a few more IRS alerts, the IRS thought that returning to the historical range of 10 to 21 days for tax refunds would work for the majority of filers.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case for the majority of My Dollar Plan readers!

Update: New in 2017, the IRS Will Delay Tax Refunds if You Claim These Tax Credits [3]: the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Additional Child Tax Credit.

Actual Tax Refund Timeframe

Readers have left all sorts of comments about the various timeframes they are (and are not) receiving their tax refunds. So let’s work on compiling the data. If you efiled and selected direct deposit, how long did you wait for your tax refund?

Leave a comment below with the timeframe it took to receive your tax refund.

Which Returns are Delayed?

Based on some questions I got, I reviewed hundreds of comments to try to see if I can find any patterns, including tax returns that I’ve filed. However, it doesn’t appear that the tax refund delays are different depending on which tax bracket [4] or income to file taxes [5] you fall in.

I don’t have enough data yet to see if certain tax credits are being held up longer than other returns. Once we get closer to the tax deadline [6], maybe we’ll see some additional patterns.

IRS Tax Refund Status

You can track the status of your tax refund with the IRS tools Where’s My Refund? [7] or the IRS Refund Tracker Tax App [8].