8 hours on hold: IRS call wait shatters families

8 hours – A federal court ruling revived a COVID-era tax question that could lead to refunds for millions of Americans. But for one taxpayer handling her dead mother’s final return, getting an IRS answer has meant repeated waits, conflicting guidance, and hours lost on

A federal court ruling is reviving a COVID-19-era tax question—one that could trigger refunds for millions of Americans. For many taxpayers, though, the first hurdle isn’t the law. It’s getting through to the Internal Revenue Service.

In the spring, I spent 8 hours on hold with the IRS while trying to close out my dead mother’s taxes. My mother died in November. Her accountant prepared her final tax return, and the return showed she was due a refund.

About a month after the filing. I received a letter from the IRS asking for documents—one to prove my mother was dead. and a couple more to prove I was her court-appointed representative. Before I replied. I tried to get clarity from the agency on a basic question: Would the IRS accept copies of the documents. rather than originals?.

The letter listed a phone number—800-829-0922. I called. An automated attendant told me that, due to high call volume, no one could take my call and to call back later. That happened a couple more times.

So the next day, I dialed the IRS main help line, 800-829-1040. I waited on hold for an hour and 54 minutes—then gave up.

I mailed my response anyway, enclosing the requested documents.

My phone log showed what “help” looked like during the process: 14 calls to different IRS numbers in May and June. Most of those calls lasted a few minutes or less, with the auto-attendant either telling me to call back later or warning that the wait time was too long to bear.

Once, the automated system offered to have an agent call me back when one became available. The return call never came.

When I did reach a point where the hold connected me to live service, the advice didn’t line up.

Across the calls I logged, my hold times were 63 minutes, 85 minutes, 18 minutes, 125 minutes, and 81 minutes. Eventually, I think I connected with IRS customer service agents three times. Each was polite and responsive. Each also gave slightly different guidance.

One agent told me my documents hadn’t been processed yet. advising me to wait a few weeks and call back. Weeks later, another agent told me the documents still hadn’t been processed. That second agent suggested I gather the documents again and call back—then send them in via fax. with the explicit note that the IRS still has fax machines—so I could have a more meaningful conversation.

A third agent told me not to bother faxing anything. That agent said it could take up to 60 days for my documents to be processed, and that there was no point calling the IRS until day 61.

So I waited again.

I calculated 60 days from the date I mailed my letter, added a week, and put a reminder on my calendar to call the IRS on the day after that—if I still hadn’t heard back.

The mismatch between what taxpayers are told and what they experience isn’t just personal frustration. It’s backed by numbers.

In a report to Congress. the independent National Taxpayer Advocate paints a darker picture of average taxpayer call experiences than what the IRS once claimed. The report says the average taxpayer who telephoned the IRS during tax season this year spent 14 minutes on hold. It also says that, across different IRS departments, average hold times ranged as high as 45 minutes.

Even more stark, the advocate reports that of the 48 million calls placed to the IRS during tax season, customer service agents answered fewer than 10 million—about 21%. That means roughly 38 million calls were never answered by an agent.

Based on my own experience, the gap didn’t feel mysterious.

The automated systems can end the experience without a human ever entering the conversation. Some callers get the information they need from the auto-attendant. Many others—my guess is most—hang up because they can’t wait on hold. can’t tolerate the auto-attendant’s prompts. or because “courtesy disconnects” end the call before an agent is available.

Earlier this year, the Center for Taxpayer Rights tested the IRS telephone system by placing 149 calls to eight different IRS phone lines in March and April. Many times, those callers encountered “courtesy disconnects,” where no one could take the call.

Excluding disconnects, the callers encountered average wait times of half an hour or more on five of the eight lines.

Nina Olson, a former national taxpayer advocate, spent 5 ½ hours on hold with the IRS on a single day when she called each of the eight lines.

If the question is whether there is a right time to call, the reporting around this problem points toward timing strategies that sound more like survival tips than customer service.

I reached out to the current taxpayer advocate to ask for tips I could pass along to other taxpayers who need to call the IRS. No one could speak to me on the record, but the office referred me to guidance in its reports and on the IRS website.

The guidance I was pointed to includes practical steps: Call during tax season. Tax season is busy, but the IRS dispatches extra agents to answer calls in the weeks leading up to April 15, which generally means shorter wait times.

Call later in the week, because wait times are longer on Mondays and Tuesdays. Call early in the day, since the IRS takes calls from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on its main line.

Have your accountant make the call, too. The IRS has a priority line for tax preparers, and in the just-finished tax season tax professionals faced an average hold time of only 8 minutes.

Even with those strategies, the basic reality remains: when large numbers of callers don’t reach a human at all—when courtesy disconnects cut people off and hold times stretch into hours—tax questions don’t just wait. They delay.

And delay matters when a refund depends on paperwork being received and processed.

Right now. the IRS call experience for many taxpayers—reflected in the advocate’s findings and in the hold times that show up in real logs—can turn a straightforward tax task into weeks of uncertainty. For people responding to IRS letters while managing the grief and logistics that come with loss. the cost isn’t abstract.

It’s time, attention, and the constant worry that the next call might come with a different answer than the last.

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