The free ways to file your taxes, and which ones you qualify for.
Open the Do I Have to Pay to File? tool →Most households can file a federal return for nothing, and a great many pay anyway. That's not an accident: the paid products have the advertising budget, and the free ones have a .gov page and no marketing at all.
The rules are small and published, so this just applies them. An income ceiling for the guided software, a lower one for free in-person help, an age of 60 for the retirement-focused volunteers, and no ceiling at all for the plain electronic forms or for the military community. Two routes are easy to miss reading the raw rules: the in-person program is open to people with disabilities and to taxpayers who'd rather work in another language, regardless of the income guideline.
Options you don't qualify for are listed too, with the exact reason and how far off you are, so nothing looks quietly skipped. So are options the IRS has discontinued, so their absence reads as something we checked rather than a list we forgot to update.
These thresholds move every filing season, and each Free File partner adds criteria of its own, so treat this as the map and the official page as the territory.
Computed entirely on your device for U.S. taxes and benefits. Nothing is ever sent anywhere, and it is free forever. Educational information, not financial, tax, investment, or legal advice.