The IRS will tell you that you only need to keep records for 7 years, but I think that is short-sighted.
The law actually says that they are only allowed to audit you for up to 7 years unless they are investigating fraud, in which case, they can investigate as far back as they want. Well, if you are (possibly falsely) accused of fraud, how can you possibly defend yourself without your records going back at least as far as their auditors want to look?
For this reason, my file cabinet has paper copies of every return I’ve ever filed, going back to my first job while in high school.
Just want to add that in addition to the tax return, the supporting documentation would be important in the event of an audit. Also note that many financial services firms only archive statements and tax forms online for seven years. Those who use e-delivery and want to retain access to information indefinitely should make hard copies.
For the last 20+ years, my returns (and supporting documents) have been stored on my computer in folders, including any relevant records and PDFs of the final federal and state filings. In 2204, the complete filing was about 30 pages. Now that I’m retired and most income comes from investments, the filing is over 175 pages.
All the information is easily accessible should it be needed, but it occupies less than 0.5 GB of computer storage (2GB if including copies on all system backups).
We started keeping copies of all our old returns when we bought our first house – a duplex – in the 70s. From my year one spring working for H&R block, I knew about keeping track over what we spent on the house because you need to have.records over the long term when you sell property to limit the profits you have to pay taxes on. Being self-employed since the 80s added more complexity. Up to around 2000 the printed tax records were the primary records; since then it’s been the PDF version of tax records. I kept personal and business financial records on Quicken for many years, but the transition to the new version around 2020 was a fiasco and broke the chain of bookkeeping records. Our federal and state tax printout has run around 100 pages since around 2000, with some things fading away but investments and retirement income filling in. Now I’m worrying about the waning continuity of Quicken records.
I agree with your concerns about possible fraud. I have kept all my returns (since 1975) but mostly because I am a packrat when it come to records, and as a former IRS employee, we get treated worse than the average taxpayer if audited.
However, the current IRS rules state that your return can be audited for up to 3 years, unless you have underreported over 25% of your income, in which case it is 6 years. But as you state, fraud has no time limit for audits.
Keeping old tax returns (and other records) also is important when you take depreciation on real estate, repairs, or material you use in business, including home offices. The IRS explains the concept and the details in Publication 946 (2025), How To Depreciate Property | Internal Revenue Service . Basically the idea is to spread the costs of something large and expensive (e.g. your house, rental property, installing a new roof or addition, or buying expensive machinery) over the expected life of the property, which for real estate can be around 40 years. The IRS gives you to deduct certain business expenses the year you buy them on Section 179 in, but they require you to depreciate others over a longer period of time. You may want to depreciate some expenses to manage tax payments, especially when start-up expenses. If you have depreciation expenses, they will show up in forms on your tax return, and good tax software (e.g. TurboTax or H&R Block) will track them for you. So you should keep these records as long as you are depreciating property so you can check you are getting your depreciation.
“Rest assured, TurboTax Desktop software for Mac will be updated for tax year 2026 (available starting in November 2026) and will work properly on macOS Sequoia 15 or later, including future versions of macOS (including OS 28)—there’s nothing to worry about. All you need to do is install tax year 2026 Desktop software like you normally would.”
I received a similar, more detailed, email from TurboTax today:
Thank you for using TurboTax Desktop software on a Mac computer. You might be seeing messages on your computer, online, or directly from Apple letting you know TurboTax (currently an Intel-based app) won’t work on future versions of macOS.
Rest assured, TurboTax Desktop software for Mac will be updated for tax year 2026 (available starting in November 2026) and will work properly on macOS Sequoia 15 or later, including future versions of macOS (including OS 28)—there’s nothing to worry about. All you need to do is install tax year 2026 Desktop software like you normally would.
If you are using or need to use a prior-year version, such as tax year 2024 or 2025, these versions will continue to work. However, you may continue to see those messages until these products have a software update in early 2027.
Thanks for being part of the TurboTax family,
The TurboTax Team
I’m posting the full message to let everyone know that apparently they are planning to update TurboTax 2024 and 2025 as well – sometime before MacOS 28.