Tax Day 2025: Residents in these states see the biggest returns from the IRS

Tax Day is officially here, meaning it’s the last chance to file your taxes on time and hopefully receive a big return.

The season started on January 27, according to an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) release, with a new launch of enhanced tools designed to help taxpayers file on time.

At the start, the IRS predicted “more than 140 million individual tax returns for tax year 2024 would be filed ahead of the Tuesday, April 15 federal deadline,” but of course, some stragglers always wait until the last minute.

Regardless of whether you file before the deadline or day-of, you could be eligible for a refund, and depending on the state you’re in, it might be bigger than you predicted.

State refunds are determined by the residents’ level of income and their withholdings selections. Withholdings is the amount of federal income tax taken out of your paycheck.

In recent years, the differences in state refund amounts have been due to stimulus checks, tax breaks, and job losses as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The largest average 2022 tax refund was in Florida (about $3,900). The second and third largest were $3,800 in Texas and $3,700 in Wyoming.

Oregon was $2,800, while Maine and Wisconsin were both $2,700.

Based on figures through the first week of April, 101.4 million returns have been processed in 2025 compared to 101.8 million tax returns in 2024. Additionally, 67.7 million refunds have been issued this year compared with 66.7 million last year.

Data of tax return processing times for this year revealed numbers mainly in line with those from last year.

Experts recently came forward to address the difficulty taxpayers faced this filing season when trying to contact an IRS representative by phone. Those in compliance also predicted the long wait times are only going to increase in the next year, especially after thousands of probationary workers were laid off at the start of 2025.

Earlier this month, the IRS began its first round of layoffs that could end up cutting as many as 20,000 staffers, which would be 25 percent of the total workforce. About 7,000 probationary IRS workers were laid off in February but have since been ordered to be reinstated by a federal judge. However, it’s not known whether those workers have returned.

Eric Santos, the executive director of the Georgia Tax Clinic, which provides free tax law services to low-income taxpayers, said the remaining IRS staff are overwhelmed with the increase in work.

Santos said: "[The IRS Staff] basically tell us they don’t have time to look at certain cases and the work is getting spread across fewer and fewer people.”