The beginning of the U.S. tax season marks a critical period for individuals, businesses, and tax professionals across the country. Typically commencing in late January, this time ushers in the period when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) starts accepting and processing federal income tax returns for the previous calendar year. It's a time characterized by gathering financial documents, understanding tax laws that may have changed, and meeting crucial deadlines.

This year, the Internal Revenue Service announced the start of the U.S. tax season 2024 on Monday, January 29th, 2024, when the agency began accepting and processing 2023 tax returns.

In the U.S., the deadline for taxpayers to file their 2023 federal income tax returns is April 15th, 2024, but they have the option to extend this deadline to October 15th, 2024, by submitting Form 4868. However, it's crucial for taxpayers to note that while the filing deadline can be extended, any taxes owed must still be estimated and paid by April 15th to avoid penalties and interest.

Tax e-filing, or electronic filing, refers to the process of submitting tax returns to the tax authorities via the Internet. This method has grown in popularity due to its convenience and efficiency. It has a lot of pros (convenience, faster processing, accuracy, immediate confirmation, and eco-friendliness) and almost no cons. Throughout the tax season, leading e-filing platforms often face significantly increased traffic, potentially causing delays in the submission process or even disruptions. Consequently, there's a risk of being unable to complete the tax refund submission or losing the entered information.

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

The reports reflect the tax websites' home pages' performance, 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 U.S. Also, to ensure the accuracy of the monitoring recordings, we use a false alarm prevention system and error verification controls. We will publish the tax-return websites response and uptime reports after April 15 th, 2024, where you can find uptime, performance, and availability information.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. resp. time
1	expresstaxrefund.com	3.839	1.922	2.281	2.681
2	etax.com	6.153	2.696	2.267	3.705
3	fileonline.1040.com	4.456	4.142	4.342	4.313
4	taxact.com	8.370	4.821	4.511	5.900
5	hrblock.com	9.686	11.951	5.973	9.204
6	taxslayer.com	11.968	10.803	10.453	11.074
7	libertytax.com	20.896	12.436	8.817	14.050
8	turbotax.com	17.435	23.381	9.448	16.755
9	efile.com	31.384	13.447	8.039	17.623
10	olt.com	26.671	15.478	23.256	21.802

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. uptime
1	etax.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	taxslayer.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.987%	99.996%
3	expresstaxrefund.com	99.969%	100.000%	99.985%	99.985%
4	taxact.com	99.967%	99.983%	100.000%	99.983%
5	fileonline.1040.com	99.888%	99.918%	99.826%	99.877%
6	hrblock.com	99.571%	99.985%	99.986%	99.847%
7	libertytax.com	99.878%	99.983%	99.541%	99.801%
8	turbotax.com	99.430%	99.687%	99.889%	99.669%
9	efile.com	99.280%	99.814%	99.770%	99.621%
10	olt.com	94.835%	99.981%	100.000%	98.272%

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".