The IRS says the average refund rose 11 percent this year and does not say from what, and its own filing season table gives the base as $2,939 going to $3,276 on fewer returns than last year
The Internal Revenue Service published a percentage on Tuesday and left out the number it was a percentage of.
The release is a readout of a meeting. Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano met New York-area stakeholders at the agency Nationwide Tax Forum in New York City last week, and the topics listed are the implementation of the Trump Accounts, guidance on the Working Families Tax Cuts, and the 2026 and 2027 filing seasons. Near the end it says the average refund was up by 11 percent over the prior year, and attributes that to the Working Families Tax Cuts.
No dollar figure appears anywhere in it.
The base is in the agency own table
The filing season statistics table for the week ending 8 May, published on irs.gov and last updated on 18 May, gives both sides. The average refund amount was $2,939 in 2025 and $3,276 in 2026, a change the table itself prints as 11.5 percent.
The difference is $337.
That table is the cumulative comparison for the season, running 9 May 2025 against 8 May 2026, and it is the last weekly one the agency published. Returns filed on extension after that date are not in it.
Fewer returns, more refunds, much more money
The refund total moved a good deal further than the average did. The number of refunds issued rose 6.0 percent, from 93,569,000 to 99,138,000, and the total amount refunded rose 18.1 percent, from $274.979bn to $324.757bn. That is $49.8bn more paid out.
Returns went the other way. Total returns received fell 0.6 percent, from 145,855,000 to 144,992,000, which is 863,000 fewer. Returns processed rose 0.3 percent, to 143,925,000. Electronic filing rose 1.1 percent, and the self-prepared half of it grew faster than the practitioner half, 1.7 percent against 0.6 percent.
Traffic to the website rose 62.6 percent, from 351,491,000 visits to 571,527,000.
Two refund counts, two different bases
The table reports direct deposit refunds separately and the two lines cannot be divided into one another. Direct deposit refunds number 99,225,000, which is more than the 99,138,000 total, because of a footnote: the total counts refunds on current year returns only, while the direct deposit line counts current and prior year returns processed in 2026.
The average direct deposit refund rose 7.9 percent, from $3,034 to $3,273, against the 11.5 percent on the overall average.
The release says separately that 98 percent of refunds were delivered electronically. It gives no period for its own figure of over 144 million returns processed, and the agency footer on the page notes that news items may not be updated after release.
