The Internal Revenue Service announced the start of the US tax season 2022 on Monday, January 24th, 2022, when the tax agency started accepting and processing individuals' 2021 tax year returns.

The filing deadline to submit last year's tax returns or an extension to file and pay the tax owed is Monday, April 18th, 2022. However, by the law, Washington, DC holidays impact tax deadlines like federal holidays do. Because of the Emancipation Day holiday in DC for everyone except taxpayers who live in Maine or Massachusetts, the due date is April 18th instead of April 15th. Taxpayers in Maine or Massachusetts have until April 19th, 2022, to file their returns due to the Patriots' Day holiday in those states. Taxpayers requesting an extension will have until Monday, October 17th, 2022, to file their federal income tax returns.

These deadlines do not apply to state and local tax returns. To make sure you file those on time, find out your state's tax filing due dates. Also, visit How to File Your Federal Taxes for detailed information about your tax return filing process.

One of the most convenient ways to file your tax report is e-filing or electronic filing. E-filing is the process of submitting tax returns over the internet rather than sending them via mail. It's much easier and has more advantages than disadvantages, so around 96% of the taxpayers preferred e-filling last year.

Some of the advantages of e-filing taxes are:

• Having a more accurate return (1% error rate with electronic tax returns vs. 20% error rate with paper tax returns)
• Receiving your tax refund faster (if you choose a direct bank deposit, you can receive yours in as few as eight days)
• Getting instant notification when IRS receives and accept your return (you can also check your tax return status and refund status anytime, anywhere)
• Knowing your return is submitted securely (your personal information is kept private)
• Security - it is safer than mailing your tax return. Most websites are equipped to prevent unauthorized people from seeing the data sent to or from those sites.
• Avoiding IRS penalties (e-file early or on time to avoid late fees, and pay later even if you can't afford it right away)

During the tax season, the major e-filling websites will experience much heavier traffic to deal with, which may slow down your process or even interrupt it. As a result, you may fail to submit your tax refund or lose all the information you have been filling out.

Every year WebSitePulse monitor precisely the response time and uptime of popular tax refund websites during tax season to see how they handle the heavy traffic. Then we report their performance and availability daily. We have picked 12 of the most popular websites to monitor and compare their performance.

The reports reflect not only the tax websites' home pages performance but also any web transaction process and websites' response time and uptime. To be more specific, measurements of e-transactions are made every 15 minutes from 3 different monitoring locations in the US. Also, to ensure the monitoring recordings' accuracy, we use a false alarm prevention system and error verification controls. We will publish the tax-return websites response and uptime reports after April 19 th, 2022, where you can find uptime, performance, and availability information.