IRS

Filing Taxes Will Cost Americans $544 Billion This Year

The complexity and burden of the tax code add insult to injury.

J.D. Tuccille | 9.30.2026 7:00 AM

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(Illustration: Tax Foundation/Vera Volkova/Anna Om/Dreamstime/Midjourney)

The process of paying taxes manages to add insult to injury by making it burdensome to comply as you cough up the money the government steals from you. The time lost keeping up on tax rules, filing paperwork, and calculating our own mugging is stolen from the rewarding areas of life, and the costs are diverted from productive activities. How much do we lose in satisfying government's demands? A new report answers that question in painful detail, just in time for the October 15 extended filing deadline.

You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.'s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday liberty.

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The High Cost of Paying High Taxes

"The federal tax code imposes many costs on the US economy. The most direct costs, of course, are the roughly $5.2 trillion in federal taxes (as of fiscal year 2025) that consume 17.3 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP)," the Tax Foundation's Alex Muresianu and Guy Cardwell wrote last week. "A less direct cost is the time taken out of our lives to comply with a Byzantine tax code that requires billions of hours to complete IRS paperwork and file tax returns."

Drawing on data from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Muresianu and Cardwell note that "Americans will spend almost 6.9 billion hours complying........

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