Where is my refund

Finding the three numbers

Every refund checker asks the same kind of thing, and every one of them rejects you if a single digit is off. The refund has to be the exact whole dollar amount from the return — not what landed in the bank, which may be less if an old balance was taken out of it.

Drop the return in and the numbers come out of it. Nothing is sent anywhere: the PDF is opened by your own browser, on your own machine. We never see it, and neither does anyone else.

Then what

Copy them across and open the official checker — the real ones, linked above. We cannot run the search for you from here: the IRS and the states will not answer a program, only a person on their own site, and we are not about to push your Social Security number through our server to try.

Before you worry

An e-filed refund usually lands in about three weeks, a paper one in six to eight. The IRS only updates once a day, overnight, so checking it twice in an afternoon tells you nothing. A return claiming the earned income or additional child tax credit is held by law until mid-February however early it was filed.

If it says nothing is found, that is usually timing — it can take days after acceptance to appear. If it still says nothing after a fortnight, or asks you to call, ring us before you ring them. We can often tell from the acknowledgement what has happened.