Now that the 2025 tax season is officially behind us, taxpayers across the U.S. can finally breathe a little easier after navigating another round of forms, deadlines, and digital submissions. For those who needed more time to file, the IRS once again offered the option to extend the filing deadline to October 15th, 2025 — though as always, any taxes owed were still due by April 15th to avoid penalties or interest.

On April 17th, 2025, we completed our annual Websitepulse Tax Season Monitoring Report, focusing on the performance of ten of the most popular U.S. tax websites. Our team measured both the homepage load times and complete web transactions that simulate the full end-user experience during peak filing days.

As in previous years, the two most critical indicators we tracked were Response Time and Uptime — essential metrics for evaluating the performance, availability, and reliability of these platforms under real-world load.

Measurements were taken every 15 minutes, 24/7, from three geographically distributed monitoring locations:

• Washington, DC (US East Coast)
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast)
• Chicago, IL (US Central)

2025 Response Time Overview

This year, the average daily response time across all monitored websites was 9.343 seconds, which is 0.829 seconds faster than in 2024. Here’s the breakdown by location:

• Washington, DC (East Coast): 6.274 sec
• San Francisco, CA (West Coast): 13.173 sec
• Chicago, IL (Central): 8.581 sec

The fastest website in 2025 was once again expresstaxrefund.com, with a remarkable average response time of 3.149 seconds, maintaining its leadership for another year. It was followed by:

• expresstaxrefund.com - 3.149 sec
• etax.com – 4.323 sec
• fileonline.1040.com – 4.963 sec

OLT.com, while showing some improvement, still had the slowest performance, with an average response time of 20.858 seconds, remaining at the bottom of the list for the seventh consecutive year.

Compared to 2024, the top three websites improved their speed by an average of 0.184 seconds, while the slowest performer — OLT.com — improved by nearly 0.944 seconds.

2025 Uptime Overview

The overall average uptime across all monitored websites for the 2025 tax season was 99.814%, slightly better than last year's 99.705%.

Uptime by location:

• Washington, DC: 99.905%
• San Francisco, CA: 99.671%
• Chicago, IL: 99.865%

The most reliable website this year was etax.com, which achieved a perfect 100% uptime, followed closely by turbotax.com and expresstaxrefund.com, both with near-perfect availability throughout the period.

At the other end, fileonline.1040.com had intermittent downtime, bringing its uptime average down to 96.58%, while OLT.com also experienced service degradation, averaging 97.83% uptime.

Overall, the 2025 tax season demonstrated once again how important digital performance is during periods of high demand. Most platforms handled the traffic with commendable reliability and speed, but a few lagged behind, reminding us of the critical need for constant optimization and infrastructure readiness in today’s online-first environment.

You can see the detailed metrics and daily performance logs in the full 2025 Tax Websites Performance & Uptime Report page.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. resp. time
1	expresstaxrefund.com	7.425	1.813	2.142	3.794
2	fileonline.1040.com	9.331	2.609	2.125	4.688
3	etax.com	10.542	2.599	1.994	5.045
4	taxact.com	11.428	3.039	2.944	5.803
5	libertytax.com	9.336	6.360	3.572	6.423
6	hrblock.com	7.179	6.294	6.426	6.633
7	taxslayer.com	11.893	8.612	8.904	9.803
8	turbotax.com	10.919	15.259	9.235	11.804
9	efile.com	30.679	11.283	4.144	15.368
10	olt.com	28.709	13.045	20.797	20.850

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. uptime
1	turbotax.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	etax.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	expresstaxrefund.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.984%	99.995%
4	taxslayer.com	99.983%	100.000%	99.984%	99.989%
5	taxact.com	99.979%	100.000%	99.971%	99.983%
6	libertytax.com	99.929%	100.000%	100.000%	99.976%
7	hrblock.com	99.985%	99.982%	99.828%	99.932%
8	efile.com	98.134%	99.981%	99.986%	99.367%
9	fileonline.1040.com	98.692%	99.217%	98.733%	98.881%
10	olt.com	99.820%	100.000%	92.856%	97.559%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2024 Tax Reports reflect a complete web transaction, representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The reporting period covers the dates between April 05 and April 19, 2023. Performance and availability measurements are made for a typical multi-step web transaction at 15 minute monitoring interval, every day between the hours of 6AM and 3AM EST. Between 3AM and 6AM is the time when a scheduled maintenance most likely will be performed by IT staff and that is why we automatically suspend the monitoring process during this time every day. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports.
The steps in each transaction are comparable for all websites, and reflect the real online user and tax e-filer experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from 3 US-based locations of the WebSitePulse monitoring network: San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, and Washington, DC. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from 3 independent resources and only after the above procedure is performed and has returned consistent results, the detected error is confirmed, recorded, and included in the daily performance reports. In these cases, an advanced WebSitePulse exclusive feature comes into play - Forced Monitoring -, which automatically switches to a 3 minute monitoring interval for increased accuracy.

About WebSitePulse:
WebSitePulse is a leading provider of global, independent, and objective availability and performance monitoring of web sites, servers, network components, web applications, e-business- and email round-trip transactions.

Contact:
For more information about this report please contact:
George T., CTO
phone: 1-407-380-1600
email:


Reproduction:
WebSitePulse launched the Performance and Uptime Reports program to keep the general public and the Internet community informed about the performance of spe cific websites and the challenges their webmasters, owners and operators are facing on a daily basis, especially when the web traffic intensifies due to som e special events through the year. Some of the most popular web destinations, related to each particular event, are selected for the purpose of the Reports, and data from their performance measurements is made available on the WebSitePulse public website.

With the intention to broadly disseminate this information for the benefit of the Internet community, we encourage the use of this information without prior approval and under the following Terms and Conditions:

• WebSitePulse should be referred as the "Source" of the information;
• WebSitePulse should be acknowledged as the owner of the copyrights of the information in the Reports;
• The texts of the Reports could be changed or altered to better suit the needs and the style of the publisher without prior notice to WebSitePu lse. However, the integrity and the meaning of the information should be preserved;

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".