Kaitlyn Wells is a senior staff writer covering the intersection of home office, productivity, and technology. Previously, she focused on pets and personal style for Wirecutter. She’s also written about personal finance topics for The Simple Dollar, MarketWatch, MSNMoney, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Regardless of whether you’re using the MyFreeTaxes version or TaxSlayer’s own offering, the software is less user-friendly than our picks. So we recommend these options only if you have a simple return and are comfortable researching tax information yourself, rather than getting assistance from the software.

H&R Block’s interview process and guidance are nearly as good as TurboTax’s. After each major section, the program provides a summary of what you’ve entered so far. And at any time, you can click the shopping cart icon to see if you’ll need to pay for the program. This means you need to be vigilant as you click through each screen, in order to avoid falling ttps://turbo-tax.org/ for the unnecessary upsell. Her research builds on the deep reporting of Melanie Pinola, who has written extensively about personal finance for sites such as Lifehacker, SmartAsset, and MyBankTracker. She has covered topics including when to hire a tax pro, the biggest deductions you should claim, and what to do to make the audit process less stressful.

Get your max refund

• Simply tap to chat or talk live with tax experts on demand. • With TurboTax, you can be confident your taxes are done turbotax past tax returns right and you’ll get every dollar you deserve. We make filing your own taxes simple, no matter what your situation.

During our 2023 testing, we realized our refund amounts were inaccurate, and we had to go back to the beginning to troubleshoot the error. Like TurboTax, H&R Block uses its interview prompts to guide you to the appropriate forms, but it sometimes doesn’t assign all of the right ones. For example, even though our fake filer had medical expenses that qualified them for the itemized deduction, H&R Block didn’t direct us to the Schedule A form to itemize their expenses. We had to scroll to the bottom of the page, select “Add deduction,” and track down the appropriate form.

Why is the amount on my Form 1099-G different than the refund I received?

Prices range from $209 to $399 for federal returns depending on complexity, plus $49-$59 per state return. We partner with the Free File Alliance to offer you options to e-file your federal and New York State income tax returns—at no cost, if you qualify. A simple tax return is the most basic type of tax return you can file, and many tax software programs let you file this return for free. A simple return generally includes W-2 income, limited interest and dividend income (i.e. investment income), standard deductions and unemployment income. Form 1099-G is a report of income you received from the Department of Revenue during the calendar year. The Internal Revenue Service requires government agencies to report to the IRS certain payments made during the year because those payments are considered gross income to the recipient.

But password protection and encryption can’t protect every aspect of your data when you share it with these companies. The good news is that there are federal guardrails that prevent tax-prep companies from disclosing the contents of your tax returns to third parties without your consent. The bad news is that there’s all sorts of other data about you that companies might disclose, and there’s no federal privacy law to regulate that. Like TurboTax, H&R Block is also now asking for permission to use the specific information in your tax return to target you with personalized ads. Since H&R Block will still file your taxes even if you don’t agree to provide these permissions, we strongly suggest you decline.