TAX SEASON

Busy Season 2026: IRS Problems, Staffing Issues and Client Wrangling Emerge as Top Pressures

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IRS dysfunction replaces OBBBA as top concern.

On the front lines (clockwise from top left): Woodard, Dienhart, Volk, Stitely, Tejero, Brady, Svihla.

By CPA Trendlines

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With only a week to go before the opening of filing season 2026, tax practitioners are focusing on IRS dysfunction as their biggest potential problem this year

And no wonder. The agency was already chronically underfunded, buried under a mountain of overdue paperwork, and crippled by ancient computer systems when it lost 25% of its workforce in early 2025.

JOIN the Busy Season Barometer survey here.

MORE TAX, PRICING, and THE 2026 OUTLOOK

Today 63% of tax professionals say a beleaguered IRS poses the single biggest risk to this year’s tax season, up from 54% just a couple of months ago, according to the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer.

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OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | ARC

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Firms use AI, planning, and “hope” to make tax season more manageable.

Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: The Advisor Edition by Dr. Jackie Meyer | See Today’s Special Offer

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Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

As firms head into tax season, the hosts of Accounting ARC make a case for lowering the temperature — and the workload — with practical tech choices, proactive planning and a stronger focus on people.

MORE Accounting ARC: Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone |  Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn’t Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC | Free Speech Is a Right; Respect Is a Responsibility | Cash Bags, Casinos & Audits: How First Jobs Shape Us | Gen Z Redefines Careers | Bootleggers, Baptitsts & CPAs: Rethinking Licensure

In a special Tax Season Readiness episode, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; joins co-hosts Liz Mason, CPA; and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, CGMA; to preview new tax platform research, spotlight emerging AI tools and talk candidly about what helps teams sustain momentum from January through April.

Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, sets the tone early. He says he intentionally avoids calling it “busy season,” noting that practitioners tell him the upcoming cycle may feel lighter than the past few years. The conversation that follows keeps returning to the same core question: What, specifically, helps firms reduce friction before deadlines hit?

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Busy Season 2026: How Ready Are You? It Depends

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The answers track firm size and practice focus.

On the front lines (clockwise from top left): Winke, Sosinski, D’Angelo, Parent, Kaplow, Gehring

By CPA Trendlines Research

Across the profession, accountants heading into the 2026 Busy Season are not sounding alarms, nor are they celebrating breakthroughs. Instead, they are settling into a steady, almost restrained confidence.

JOIN the Busy Season Barometer survey here.

MORE TAX, PRICING, and THE 2026 OUTLOOK

The latest Busy Season Barometer reveals that firms’ sense of readiness bears a striking resemblance to where they stood a year ago. For some, this signals resilience. For others, it signals stagnation. The portrait that emerges is a profession caught between incremental improvements and persistent operational friction.

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Outlook 2026: Accountants Brace for a Rough Economy

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Expect strong demand for tax planning, business advisory and bookkeeping cleanup work. 

By CPA Trendlines Research

The CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer indicates that tax and accounting leaders anticipate growth in their own firms, even as they prepare for anxious business clients, persistent inflation, and a policy environment that keeps planning on edge.

MORE Busy Season and 2026 Outlook

BUSY SEASON BAROMETER: Join the survey. Get the results

About half of all accountants in the survey are bracing for a deteriorating economy, with a third expecting rosier scenarios, for a net negative 17.2 percentage points. For small and mid-sized businesses, accountants are at a negative 9.3 points.

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Outlook 2026: The Painful Paradigm Shift in Staff Pay and Hiring

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Pivoting with the Paradigm: Staff salaries are rising sharply even as job growth plateaus.

New jobs data signal fundamental pivot for accounting firms.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The year 2026 may be long remembered as the paradigm-shifting moment when accounting firms were forced to pivot everything from their business models to their budgets.

MORE Outlook 2026, Pay, Hiring

The reason: Salary and pay increases are accelerating even as hiring momentum stalls.

Going into 2026, labor costs have been cleaved from labor supply. The new, structurally higher staffing line is forcing firms to rewrite their budgets as well as business models.

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Outlook 2026: Higher Tax Prices, Rising Strains, and a Widening Gap Among Firms

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The 2026 filing season will have an increasingly uneven pricing structure.

Busy Season Barometer: Most tax practices remain clustered below $1,500 in typical annual client fees. A smaller, higher-priced tier is emerging, characterized by minimum fees, selective client retention, and a stronger willingness to raise rates. Dig deeper, and the reality is even more nuanced.

By CPA Trendlines

Top-priced tax practices are driving typical annual client fees toward $3,000 and above this year, according to the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer survey, underscoring how rising costs are pressuring most firms even as a smaller group gains pricing power through scale, selectivity, and tighter engagement control.

JOIN the Busy Season Barometer survey. Get the results. | MORE TAX and PRICING

One CPA respondent put it bluntly: “We are raising rates again this year. Some clients will leave. That’s fine. We can’t keep doing $400 returns when staff wages keep rising.” Another practitioner described a more selective approach: “We didn’t raise everyone equally. We raised prices where the work was painful and left simpler clients mostly alone.”

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Outlook 2026: NATP Shows Tax Prep Prices Surging and Diverging

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Experience, complexity, and scarcity redefine the market

Volume and consulting drive growth: Of the 48% of firms reporting advances, 78% credit more business and 54% credit higher-grade services. Source: NATP

By CPA Trendlines

Tax preparation is getting markedly more expensive in 2026, and not in the slow, incremental way many firms have long assumed they can explain away.

In a widely used pricing model, the National Association of Tax Professionals reports the average base charge for a Form 1040 with Schedules is $236, up from a 2024 average of $162 reported in the same study series. That’s a 45.7% nominal increase in two years for the profession’s signature product, before a single schedule, state filing, or complexity premium is added.

JOIN the Busy Season Barometer survey. Get the results.

MORE TAX and PRICING

The U.S. tax preparation market is not merely more expensive.  It is increasingly stratified, with pricing that clearly distinguishes between complex professional work and the lower tiers of retail and do-it-yourself alternatives.

Across multiple independent pricing measures, certified public accountants and credentialed tax professionals command fees that are substantially higher than the base costs advertised by major retail chains, software platforms, and dwindling government-sponsored free filing options. The result is a world of tax preparation pricing that reflects not only the complexity of engagement but also client expectations, risk management, service delivery models, and clear segmentation of value. READ MORE →

Give Tax Clients Better Instructions

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Eleven steps that will help them help you.

By Ed Mendlowitz
Tax Season Opportunity Guide

Providing instructions of what a client needs to do must be clear enough so that the client doesn’t call you to find out what to do.

MORE by Ed Mendlowitz
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Sometimes taking an extra minute to lay out what the client should do can eliminate that call or indecisive moment a client might feel.
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Five Procedures to Simplify Your Tax Season

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Three young businessmen in office training session

Yes, there are checklists.

By Ed Mendlowitz
Tax Season Opportunity Guide

One way to guarantee extra work is to have everything always done differently each time it is done.

MORE by Ed Mendlowitz
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

Not establishing uniform procedures is bad business and unnecessarily consumes part of your life. Consistency in performance reduces work and review time and creates a greater reliance on the staff people.
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