When Can I Start Filing Taxes?
HOLD…HOLD…
As the calendar turns to 2025, many people immediately start to think about filing taxes. While it’s generally a good thing to avoid procrastination (I tell myself…), your 2024 tax filing may be an exercise in patience for some…
If you are one of those very organized people who do have all your ducks in a row on January 1st (congratulations!), you still will have to wait to file. The IRS has announced that they will be accepting 2024 tax filings on Monday, January 27, 2025. So, even if you use the IRS Free File software, they will hold your submission until the 27th before accepting the return. And do you really want the IRS to hold on to your tax return and file it for you?
Documents Needed for Filing 2024 Tax Returns
More commonly, you need to wait for banks, brokerage firms, and other investment companies to prepare the necessary forms you need to complete your return. For most custodians (aka holders of your money), those forms start to go out in mid-February. If you have online access to your account, you can access forms faster than waiting for them in the mail. However, we often recommend setting your tax forms to be mailed (vs. “paperless”), because we have had a few folks forget to include their 1099s when filing.
Key Dates for 2024 Tax Returns
For the 2024 tax returns, here are the key dates:
- Monday, January 27th – the IRS begins accepting returns
- January 31st to early February – very few 1099s will be issued – if you only hold individual stocks in your brokerage account, then you may receive your form early
- Mid-February – most 1099s start to get issued – for investment accounts, this will include information on capital gains, dividends, and interest – for retirement accounts, the 1099-R will include the amount withdrawn and the taxes withheld (if any)
- Tuesday, April 15th – 2024 tax forms (or extension filings) are due
- October 15th, 2025 – filings are due for those that filed for extensions
While the official legal deadline to send Form 1099 from brokerage accounts is February 15, 2025, we have already been receiving requests to please send tax forms out—and heard the consternation that brokerages are always so slow at producing the tax forms for investment accounts.
To be fair, the tax law was changed in October 2008—brokerage tax forms used to be legally required to be in the mail by January 31st. But, starting with the 2008 tax forms, that deadline was pushed back to February 15th. The main reason was qualified dividends.
In 2003, the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act created a tax preferred category of dividends. If a dividend was paid from a US corporation, and the stock had been held for at least 60 days around the dividend’s payment date, then the dividend would only be taxed at a preferred rate of 15%…not at the taxpayer’s ordinary income rate (which could range as high as 35%).
For brokerage firms—or mutual fund managers—to be qualified, a dividend that is paid on December 31st would generally be qualified if it was held until January 31. So, brokerage firms and mutual fund managers were unable to properly report which dividends were qualified or not to taxpayers by January 31st….and there were constant corrected Form 1099s being issued in February once the qualified dividend time frame had been met. The confusion of tracking qualified or non-qualified dividends led to the deadline for Forms 1099 being pushed to February 15th to allow for proper reporting.
Every year, custodians like Schwab get tables like this for every mutual fund, reporting how much of the cash dividends received from the fund are considered qualified—it then takes them a few days to factor in this information into their tax reporting so that your forms can be accurate:

In addition, if you own bond mutual funds, US Government interest is typically exempt from state tax. And state municipal bond income is generally exempt from Federal tax. So, custodians and mutual fund companies also must account for all of this in supplementary tables like these by January 31st:


So, it’s a lot of data that comes in by January 31st that must be compiled and properly accounted for on your Form 1099! Hence the new legal deadline of February 15th for those forms.
If you are a client of Meridian, our custodian Schwab expects to run the first batch of tax forms that do not have mutual funds, bond interest, or qualified dividends on January 31st.
The target date for the full batch of tax forms that include accounts with mutual funds or qualified dividend stocks will be on February 15th. These forms will be available online at Schwab on February 15th and available for download into tax software at that point as well.
So, sit back—procrastinate a little bit (until mid-February)—and enjoy the lull before the tax storm. If you just can’t help yourself, here is a handy tax organizer to work through until you get your Form 1099s…

(Crush is blocking any potential pre-emptive tax filing…)