Do I need to pay someone to do my taxes?

Two pages in this library answer this, and both are about the United States. When your taxes deserve a professional draws the line between the return software can do and the return a paid preparer earns their fee on. Ask for the free version by name is about the people who went looking for the free option, believed they had found it, and paid anyway. Read together, they say the same thing from two sides: for a simple return the paid help is doing data entry you could do free, and the free route is real but is never the door you are shown.

A job, a W-2 and the standard deduction: software already does the whole job. When your taxes deserve a professional puts it plainly: if your income is a job with a W-2 and you take the standard deduction, software already does everything a preparer would do. The reason the page gives is unglamorous. For a straightforward return, a human preparer is performing data entry into a program that asks the same interview questions yours would, and people who tested it, the same numbers through a free program and a paid desk, got the same refund to the dollar, minus the fee. The page unhooks one hope before you shop: a bigger refund is not a service anyone honest can sell you on a simple return, because the refund is mostly decided by your withholding, how much was taken from each paycheck all year, and a preparer types the same numbers in. The page’s exercise for today is to write your tax situation in one sentence, where money arrived from this year and anything unusual, and if the sentence is ‘one job, one W-2, nothing weird’, you have your answer.

A business, a rental, a complicated year: that is what professionals are for. The same page names what makes a return stop being simple, and calls each item a genuine door into paid help earning its keep: self-employment or side-business income and its expenses; a rental property and its depreciation; meaningful stock sales; living and working across state lines; a first home; a windfall; a year with credits in it you have only half-heard of. Several accounts describe a good professional in these situations finding money that covered the fee several times over, and, just as valuable, being a person you can call in July. If your expenses might beat the standard deduction, mortgage interest, large donations, heavy medical costs, the page says that arithmetic itself is a fine question to pay someone to check once, after which you will know for years. Multi-state years are, in the page’s words, the classic ‘simple’ return that isn’t: if you lived in one state and worked in another, expect software to fight you, and consider that a legitimate reason for help.

If you pay, pay someone who signs. The seasonal storefront chains sit in what the professional page calls an awkward middle, and the testimony from inside them is the caution: crash-trained seasonal staff, punishing hours, and a culture one veteran summed up as file first, amend later. The people there type your forms into commercial software; the page’s reading is that if your return is simple enough for them it was simple enough for free software, and if it is complex enough to need help it deserves a credentialed one-person shop or small firm, a CPA or an Enrolled Agent, a federal credential the page says is held by many good small operations, who gives you time, answers questions and signs the return. A paid preparer signing as the preparer is not a formality, the page says; it is them accepting liability for their work, and one who wants to file it as ‘self-prepared’ has told you everything.

The free version is real. It is just never the door you are shown. Ask for the free version by name opens with the people who paid for software advertised as free, not a few people and not small amounts, and explains the mechanism once because it repeats everywhere the pattern appears. The free tier genuinely exists and genuinely covers a simple return. Your return is slightly less simple, one extra credit, a second state, a scrap of freelance income, and that moves you to a paid tier; the prompt telling you so arrives after you have typed in everything you own, at which point paying is easier than starting again, which the page says is not a coincidence. The page also says why it feels this hostile: the companies that sell tax preparation have a straightforward interest in filing remaining complicated enough that people feel they must buy help, and they spend real money defending that complexity. The page draws the personal conclusion for you: the confusion is not you being bad at forms.

Start at the government, not at a search engine. That is the whole trick on the free-version page. The tax authority publishes its own index of free filing options, and the free tier you reach through that index is the one the provider committed to, rather than the one their advertising is steering you toward; same companies, sometimes, different door. The page says there is an income cutoff on that route, and a version with no cutoff at all for people willing to work directly with the forms themselves, free at any income and with no hand-holding. It prints no figures, on purpose: the cutoffs reset every year, free options get added and cancelled, and one that existed for the 2025 season was discontinued for 2026. Look the current cutoffs up on the tax authority’s own site for the year you are actually filing, rather than trusting any number you find written down.

You can have a person do it, for nothing. Both pages say so. The free-version page describes volunteer programs backed by the tax authority that prepare returns in person at libraries, community centres and similar places: one for people on lower incomes, for people with disabilities and for anyone who would rather not do this in English, and a separate one for older filers. Trained volunteers, no product at the end, no upsell; they run through the filing season, and the page says the only real difficulty is finding your nearest one. The professional page names the first of them, VITA, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program the IRS sponsors, and says it is certified and reviewed, not amateur hour; its income cap moves each year, and the page says to search VITA with the IRS’s name for the current one. For finding a site, the free-version page points at the numbers at its foot, and one of them is in the Resource Bank here: 211, where one free call connects you to local help and a real person looks up services near you.

Two things people worked out for themselves. If the federal filing is free but the state filing costs, the free-version page says some people generate the state return inside the free software, then copy the figures onto the state’s own blank form and mail it; tedious, legal, and it costs a stamp. And if you want to check your own work, run the same numbers through a second free program and see whether the two agree; where they differ, it may be one of them asking about a credit the other never mentioned. The page names the cost of that check honestly: it is also doing your taxes twice, worth it on a complicated year and probably not on a simple one.

Whatever you do, keep the paper and answer the letters. The professional page’s closing advice recurs, it says, from everyone who learned it the hard way: keep the documents, answer every letter promptly, and when in doubt about one strange item, one hour of a professional’s time to ask a question costs a fraction of a whole engagement, and a fraction of getting it wrong. One scheduling trick on that page comes with a warning attached: filing an extension so a rested professional can do your return in the calm of summer is clever and legal, but an extension moves the paperwork deadline only, and any tax you owe is still due in April, so estimate and pay it then, or the summer serenity arrives with penalties. A ‘free second look’ at past returns is a real service and a double-edged one: it can surface money you were owed, and it can surface errors that mean you owe.

Who these pages are not for. Both are US pages. The professional page says Canada’s system, forms and free options are different enough that only the triage idea travels, and the free-version page says all of it is the United States only. If your return involves foreign tax credits, unusual business income or anything genuinely complicated, the free-version page says the people in its conversations were clear that all the software struggles and paying somebody may be the cheaper mistake. And if you are over the income limit for the free programs, that page says being over one is not a moral failing, and the fillable forms route stays open at any income if you are willing to do the arithmetic yourself.