If you have been getting your tax refund in the mail, that check is not coming this year. The IRS stopped issuing paper refund checks for individual taxpayers on September 30, 2025. File a return without a routing number and the refund does not arrive faster. It arrives late, or it gets stuck in a queue you did not agree to join.
The rule behind the change is Executive Order 14247, “Modernizing Payments to and from America’s Bank Account,” signed in March 2025. The IRS made it real on September 30 of the same year. During the 2025 filing season, about 87 million refunds went out by direct deposit, or 93% of the total. The other 7% came as paper checks. That 7% is millions of people, and it is the group this hits.
Here’s what they don’t tell you. Direct-deposit refunds normally land in under 21 days after e-filing. Paper checks used to take six weeks or more, and the paper option is essentially gone. Leave the bank fields blank on your return and the IRS mails you a CP53E notice asking for bank info. You get 30 days to respond. If you don’t respond and the IRS can’t fit you into the narrow hardship carve-out, the refund can idle in a queue for months while paperwork gets sorted.
The math is not close. Twenty-one days versus six weeks-plus, on money that is already yours.
If you have a bank account, the fix is a routing number and an account number in the two boxes on the refund line. That’s it. Do it once, done.
If you don’t have a bank account, you have options and none of them are worse than waiting. The IRS is publishing an alternate track for the unbanked: prepaid debit cards, certain mobile apps, and digital wallets can now receive refunds. The FDIC keeps a plainly named list at FDIC.gov/GetBanked with no-monthly-fee, no-overdraft accounts. Most take under ten minutes to open online with an ID. Credit unions are on MyCreditUnion.gov.
There is a narrow exception carve-out for hardship and legal edge cases. It is narrow. Do not plan around it.
Do this now. If you filed a return this spring and left the banking fields blank, watch your mail for a CP53E and answer it inside the 30-day window. Ignoring that letter is how a refund goes from “delayed” to “gone until you fight for it.” If you filed an extension and are working on your return this summer, put your account details on the refund line before you send it. If you don’t have an account, open one at FDIC.gov/GetBanked or MyCreditUnion.gov this week. Then file. Not optional.
For next year’s return, wire up the direct deposit info in your tax software once. It carries over. You will never have to think about this again.
File this away for anyone in your family who still mails checks: the IRS made the choice for them. The paper refund era ended nine months ago. The only question is whether they find out by reading a Candid Yak piece or by refreshing a “Where’s My Refund” page for eight weeks.
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