I believe there are no others that run on Macs and support e-file.
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Is that an upper limit? My federal and Massachusetts state returned add up to around 100 pages each year. Part of that comes from the way the forms are structured in a print format, where there may be as little as one line of information I supplied on the page. Some is the complications that arise when you get older and have multiple sources of income. We have my self-employment, book royalties, my wife’s pension, our social security, investments, our IRAs, and income fromr rental property, and copies of some federal forms must be submitted to the state.
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No. It’s just an approximate figure. The PDF includes every form TT Online submitted as a part of your filing, as well as various voucher-forms you may need for making payments (e.g., estimated taxes). In my case, it came up to 60 pages.
I also download and retain this file. Actually two files - one that’s presented when TT asks you to review your return, and one that’s generated after filing. The two files are not 100% identical. In 2025, the review file included a few pages of cover-letter text not in the return-file. In prior years, the review file also contained electronic forms of various worksheets used to compute the values on the filed forms, although I haven’t seen that recently.
I also print the file (4-up, double-sided, to save paper and room in my filing cabinet), just in case something should happen to my electronic storage.
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One reason to use TurboTax Online instead of the desktop product is that the desktop product has been getting steadily worse each year.
The impression I get is that TT now has two kinds of interview dialogs: old classic Desktop pages, and new ones that appear to be a port of the online product web pages. There’re clear differences; the web page ones don’t act like a desktop application, and have lots of bugs. Every year more pages get converted to the new type, which means more bugs.
The worst case I’ve seen is the new pages for reviewing stock sales. They are really bad, and every year they get worse. In tax year 2025, the problems included:
- Not all in one list. You have to first navigate to a “section” (a range of pages), and then select a page within the section, and then find the sale in the subset list that’s displayed.
- But every time you edit a lot, it goes back to the first page for that section. Every. Single. Time.
- The list doesn’t size the columns for the data, so you get Headings and detail items (including amounts!) split to two lines.
- When you go to the last page of the last section, it just displays a completely blank page! The secret is that when this happens, you need to scroll before it will render the page. Note that there are no scroll indicators, so there’s no way for a user to know this.
- It doesn’t permit “&” in the security name, so you can’t have a security for an S&P 500 index.
Last year they also changed the Supporting Details dialog. How do I know?
- Double-clicking a field no longer displays the Supporting Details dialog.
- There’s no longer any way to know that you have entered (or imported) Supporting Details. In prior tax years it changed the field to blue.
- Entering numbers into Supporting Details has a new bug: each field can only enter so many digits, and then it won’t accept any more.
And that’s not all for tax year 2025. Another new problem (but not web view related) is that the estimated tax payment options uses prior year actual year than the next year estimated withholding. If you’re estimating that the 2026 withholding will be lower than 2025 actual, then it under estimates how much additional estimated tax payments need to be paid, which will result in underpayment.
Wait… I’m assuming that the “web view” pages would be better in the online product. It could also be that the dialog display bugs have always been in the online product, so now the desktop product is just picking up the same problems.
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By no means. That will get as long as it needs be. It is your entire filing both federal and state (in my case CA). In my case as a regular salaried employee with nothing too special going on, it becomes a fairly simple filing so I’m sure many here will have substantially more than 50 pages. It’s also true though that of those 50 pages, most are very sparsely populated forms — information density is very low.
Back in the 70s as a starving grad student I worked one spring as a tax preparer for H&R block and as I recall almost all of the returns I prepared were less than 10 pages. Tax returns then were quite simple for most people, although they got more complex if you owned a house and wanted to itemize deductions. Current tax laws and returns are far more complex, and that complexity has made a lot money for TurboTax and H&R Block.
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Not to derail too much, but I wish we would find a way back to the simpler returns of those days.
In the interest of keeping folks politically engaged, I think it would serve us well if ≥80% of folks could do their returns by hand without much fuss. Now of course there will always be complicated cases and businesses or self employed entrepreneurs are certainty a different matter, but most Americans have either wages or SS/pension income and perhaps a mortgage or some other loan. If we had a system that would allow those folks to fill out their returns in a quick and simple manner (i.e. none of the “Form 1041, Schedule G, line 2a; or Form 990-T, Part III, line 1a” mumbo jumbo), it would ensure that most Americans understood their taxes, their taxation system and either stood behind its principles and fairness, or engaged politically to make it a fairer better system. This idea that regular salaried people with a mortgage and a 401(k) should have to either hire a tax consultant or buy an app just to file their annual income taxes, makes for an environment where people become alienated from taxation and how their government collects/spends or just works in general. I worked in Sweden for a few years and was absolutely taken away by the efficiency of their tax system: at the beginning of the year their IRS would send me a completed tax filing where all my information for their equivalents of W2, 1095, 1099, etc. had already been filled in. I could literally text them to say “I accept” and that was the end of it. A week later money was wired to my account. Done. My entire tax return fit on essentially one single A4 page and took all of 15 seconds to manage. And even as a foreigner, I understood every single line on that form, where it came from, and how it had been calculated. I also immediately understood how my final tax was calculated based on a simple progressive table printed on the reverse of that sheet. I think in the interest of better politics, better citizen’s participation, and more sustainable fiscal policy, it would serve us all well if the tax code were modified to the point where for most Americans taxes become understandable again, without hiring a CPA or buying into apps that end up submitting 50-page documents. Perhaps, rather than focusing on few relatively complicated edge cases and in the process burdening the vast majority that has much more straightforward situations, we should strive for a system that is geared primarily at the regular Joe.
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While Simon’s suggestion certainly has merit, I don’t think it will ever happen. Not only would tens of thousands accountants / tax preparers object, but TurboTax and HRBlock have enough lobbying power that the IRS free filing software that they offered (in some states) last year has been curtailed because they convinced the administration to want private industry, rather than the government to fill out tax forms.
Side note: I worked at the IRS for 13 years after I retired from my online publishing job and then retired again permanently. The IRS had (even then) programs that could do things similar to what Simon describes, but it was only used for people who didn’t file returns. Independently, the tax examining folks have software to review returns and compare the 1099s and w-2s filed with the government against taxpayer returns (in the process recalculating the “correct” tax if the detected taxpayer omissions were correct.) Incidentally, IRS employees generally had a dim view of H&R Block, based on the errors included in returns their staff prepared. Of course I left the IRS in 2014 so much may have changed there, (Probably for the worse – the Trump administrations have generally cutting much funding to the IRS),
(I personally have used TurboTax since it began as MacInTax, and while it could be much better at explaining things, I have always gotten accurate returns without too much trouble.)
I still do my taxes “by hand”… on the Mac.
I download the pdf forms from IRS.gov, and then use Preview to “fill them in”.
Over the years (and going back all the way to the old Microsoft Works), I’ve created some of my own spreadsheets, such as for:
Schedule A (itemized deductions, though I don’t use this anymore)
Social Security benefits worksheet (created by hand from the IRS instructions)
“Simplified Method” worksheet (for computing retirement pension income NOT part of SS)
Then… just enter a few numbers, and I have the “final number” I need for form 1040.
(I still do a final “by hand calculation check”, just to be sure)
But… my taxes are pretty simple.
Just SS, retirement pension, interest, IRA withdrawal. No “income” items at all.
I got out of “mutual funds” a few years’ back, but even then did the required forms by hand.
I’m sure most of the users of this forum have more complicated needs…