The IRS has roughly 75,000 employees as of early 2026, down from about 100,000 at the end of fiscal year 2024. The workforce shrank by approximately 25,000 people over the course of 2025 through a mix of terminations, a deferred resignation program, and formal reductions in force. The most recent official full-time equivalent count is 90,516 for fiscal year 2024.1Internal Revenue Service. IRS Budget and Workforce
The 2024 Peak
Fiscal year 2024 was the high point for the modern IRS. The agency used 90,516 full-time equivalent positions, nearly 8,000 more than in fiscal 2023 and 13.3 percent above 2015 levels.1Internal Revenue Service. IRS Budget and Workforce Total employees on the payroll, counting part-time and seasonal workers, topped 100,000 by the end of that fiscal year. That was the largest IRS workforce since 1997.
Most of the growth traced back to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which originally set aside $79.4 billion over ten years for technology, taxpayer services, and enforcement. The agency was actively recruiting revenue agents, data scientists, and cybersecurity specialists on the strength of that funding.
What Happened in 2025
The trajectory reversed sharply. Four things drove the headcount down.
In February 2025, the IRS terminated 7,315 probationary employees. Federal courts in California and Maryland later ruled those terminations improper, and the IRS sent reinstatement letters to all 7,315 on March 17, 2025.2Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. IRS Terminated Probationary Employees Without Following Internal Procedures Many had already moved on. The number who actually returned was much smaller than the number reinstated on paper.
A government-wide deferred resignation program let federal employees stop working immediately while staying on the payroll through September 2025. Thousands of IRS employees accepted.
Formal reductions in force followed later in the year. Roughly 1,300 RIF notices went to IRS staff. The IT workforce absorbed a disproportionate share of the losses, shedding about 2,000 employees, and 50 IT leaders were removed from their positions and placed on administrative leave.
A January 2025 executive directive ordered federal employees back to in-person work, and the IRS cancelled all existing remote and telework agreements effective March 8, 2025.3Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Telework Decreased After the Return to In-Person Work Directive That mandate pushed additional departures, especially among IT staff who had been hired into fully remote roles.
Congress also pulled back the money that would have paid for a larger workforce. Three separate legislative actions between 2023 and 2025 rescinded $41.8 billion of the original $79.4 billion Inflation Reduction Act allocation, leaving $37.6 billion as of March 2025. All of the rescinded amount came from enforcement.4Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The IRS’s Inflation Reduction Act Spending Through March 31, 2025 The hiring targets in the agency’s original strategic operating plan are effectively dead without that funding.
Where 75,000 Fits Historically
The IRS peaked above 101,000 full-time employees in 1997. After the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 reorganized the agency, the workforce gradually declined. By the early 2010s it sat around 94,000. A prolonged period of budget austerity and a congressional hiring freeze then cut headcount by nearly 20 percent over the following decade.
The Inflation Reduction Act reversed that decline, briefly. At roughly 75,000 employees today, the IRS is smaller than it was during most of the 2010s austerity period the 2022 law was meant to fix. Return volume has moved the opposite direction: the agency processed more than 266.6 million tax returns and other forms in fiscal 2024,5Internal Revenue Service. SOI Tax Stats – IRS Data Book compared with about 110 million in 1969, when the agency had roughly 50,000 employees.
Where IRS Employees Work
The workforce is spread across a handful of major divisions.
Taxpayer Services
This division handles the public-facing work: processing returns at seven centers around the country, answering phone calls, staffing walk-in assistance centers, and managing correspondence.6Internal Revenue Service. Taxpayer Services at a Glance Headcount here swells with seasonal hires between January and April to handle roughly 150 million individual returns. The fiscal 2025 budget request for Taxpayer Services was about $2.8 billion.7U.S. Department of the Treasury. Internal Revenue Service FY 2025 Budget Request
Enforcement
Revenue agents, revenue officers, and tax examiners conduct audits, pursue unpaid taxes, and review returns. Enforcement had the largest fiscal 2025 budget request at $5.4 billion.7U.S. Department of the Treasury. Internal Revenue Service FY 2025 Budget Request In fiscal 2024, enforcement staff closed more than 505,000 audits and recommended over $29 billion in additional tax.5Internal Revenue Service. SOI Tax Stats – IRS Data Book This is also the piece of the agency most exposed to the 2025 cuts, since every dollar of the IRA rescissions came out of the enforcement account.
Operations Support
Operations Support runs the technology infrastructure, facilities, and data security systems. The IRS still depends on legacy computer systems dating back decades, and modernization has grown harder after the loss of 2,000 IT employees in 2025.
Criminal Investigation
CI is the agency’s law enforcement arm. Its special agents carry firearms, execute search warrants, and investigate tax fraud and money laundering, then refer cases to the Department of Justice.8Internal Revenue Service. Internal Revenue Manual 9.1.2 – Authority CI has always been small relative to the agency as a whole. It had just over 2,000 special agents at the end of fiscal 2019, its lowest level since the early 1970s.9Internal Revenue Service. IRS Criminal Investigation Releases Fiscal Year 2019 Annual Report
What Thinner Staffing Means If You Have to Deal With the IRS
Staffing drives how long anything takes. As of early 2026, the agency was still processing individual correspondence received in December 2025, business correspondence from June 2025, and amended individual returns filed in January 2026.10Internal Revenue Service. Processing Status for Tax Forms A business letter sent in summer 2025 may have sat unopened for six months or more.
Phones tell the same story. TIGTA found callers waiting 30 minutes or longer on 18 different IRS phone lines during the 2025 filing season.11Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Telephone Level of Service and Average Wait Times
Audit rates are also likely to keep falling from already low levels. Taxpayers reporting more than $10 million in income faced an 11 percent audit rate for tax year 2019; those in the $1 million to $5 million range faced 1.6 percent.12Internal Revenue Service. Compliance Presence The IRS estimates the annual gross tax gap at roughly $540 billion, based on projections for tax years 2017 through 2019.13Internal Revenue Service. The Tax Gap Closing that gap requires people the agency no longer has.
If your situation is anything more complicated than a clean return, plan for delay. Amended returns, correspondence audits, identity theft cases, and injured spouse claims all move through queues that are now understaffed relative to demand.