IRS penalty statistics: five findings from sixteen years of the Data Book civil penalty table

The IRS Data Book’s civil penalty table is the only public series on how many penalties the IRS assesses and how many it takes back. Read across sixteen editions, FY2010 to FY2025, it says five things worth knowing before a penalty conversation with a client. Every figure below comes from the IRS workbooks behind the by-the-numbers tool, in thousands of dollars as the IRS prints them, and each heading links to the tool with that view set.

1. FY2025 is unlike any other year

The FY2025 table reports $1,247,074,030 thousand ($1.25 trillion) in civil penalties assessed and $1,210,426,532 thousand ($1.21 trillion) abated, 97.1 percent of assessed dollars (Data Book Table 4-2). FY2024 assessed $84,064,300 thousand. Employment taxes account for $1,150,622,767 thousand of the FY2025 assessments, 92.3 percent of the total, with $1,149,813,121 thousand abated. Within employment taxes, the delinquency row shows $745,116,635 thousand assessed and $745,724,278 thousand abated (more abated than assessed), failure to pay $287,509,701 thousand assessed and $286,848,544 thousand abated, and federal tax deposits $117,895,214 thousand assessed and $117,210,987 thousand abated. The counts did not move the same way: 4,457,891 employment penalties in FY2025 against 4,410,799 in FY2024, so the dollars reflect a small number of enormous assessments reversed in the same year.

The Data Book narrative repeats the figures (“$1.2 trillion in civil penalties in FY 2025”) and gives no explanation; no footnote was added and, as of November 1, 2026, no erratum appeared on irs.gov. The figures are presented here as printed in the Data Book, with that caveat. Excluding employment taxes, FY2025 assessed $96,451,263 thousand and abated $60,613,411 thousand, a 62.8 percent abatement rate that is in line with the series.

Open the tool: employment taxes, all penalty types, log scale

2. Failure-to-file abatements and the COVID relief notices

In FY2025 the IRS abated $1,428,229 thousand of the $6,475,833 thousand of individual delinquency (failure-to-file) penalties assessed, 22.1 percent by amount and 10.9 percent by count (437,374 of 4,009,691). The two years before were upside down. FY2024 abated $17,044,173 thousand against $5,393,158 thousand assessed (316 percent), and FY2022 abated $35,138,124 thousand against $35,495,632 thousand assessed, with 3,881,725 abatements against 3,371,240 assessments.

The FY2022 pattern coincides with the automatic relief in Notice 2022-36, under which failure-to-file penalties for 2019 and 2020 returns “will be waived or, to the extent previously assessed, abated, refunded, or credited”, and the FY2024 pattern coincides with Notice 2024-7, the automatic failure-to-pay relief for 2020 and 2021 that the IRS announced on January 10, 2024. The Data Book itself does not say so; this is an inference from timing, and it is labelled as one.

Open the tool: individual delinquency, abatement rate by amount

3. The federal tax deposit penalty swing

Employment-tax federal tax deposit penalties were $3,108,562 thousand assessed in FY2010 (2,016,966 penalties), $4,223,462 thousand in FY2019 (1,216,655), $18,942,405 thousand in FY2024 (1,173,044) and $117,895,214 thousand in FY2025 (1,216,346), with 99.4 percent of the FY2025 dollars abated in the same year. Across the series the count of FTD penalties fell 40 percent while the dollars assessed rose 38 times. Before FY2024 the FTD abatement rate by amount ran from 33.5 percent (FY2016) to 71.0 percent (FY2017), with FY2020 at 267 percent ($10,975,550 thousand abated on $4,106,008 thousand assessed). For how the penalty is computed and designated, see the failure-to-deposit calculator.

Open the tool: employment FTD penalties, log scale

4. Nonreturn penalties: where the 1099 penalties live

The nonreturn line is the only place information return penalties under IRC 6721 and 6722 appear, mixed with preparer penalties, Form 8300 penalties, frivolous return penalties, dyed fuel penalties and the trust fund recovery penalty. FY2025 shows 255,990 nonreturn penalties assessed for $5,043,994 thousand (about $19,704 each) and 43,320 abated for $2,444,171 thousand, 48.5 percent of dollars and 16.9 percent of count. But $738,943,809 of the abated amount is TFRP “credited”, so abatements other than TFRP credits were about $1,705,227 thousand (33.8 percent). The count fell from 437,966 in FY2010 (and a peak of 556,363 in FY2011) to 182,936 in FY2020 before climbing back to 255,990; the dollars have stayed between $4.3 billion and $8.0 billion every year. A payer cannot see from the Data Book how much of the line is Form 1099 and W-2 penalties.

Open the tool: nonreturn penalties, number assessed

5. The volume story is individual

Estimated tax penalties on individuals went from 7,412,249 in FY2010 ($1,617,298 thousand) to 15,734,656 in FY2025 ($12,060,514 thousand), 2.1 times the count and 7.5 times the dollars, with only 2.1 percent of FY2025 dollars abated. Individual failure-to-pay penalties went from 15,538,896 to 24,251,980, and bad check penalties from 152,225 to 2,209,697 (14.5 times). All civil penalties assessed rose from 37,055,841 in FY2010 to 54,276,742 in FY2025 while the abatement count stayed between 3,824,582 and 8,510,272. The estimated tax penalty calculator and the failure-to-pay guide cover the two penalties doing the growing.

Two other lines move without explanation in the Data Book: partnership delinquency penalties (late Form 1065) were $49,282,653 thousand assessed in FY2025 (402,483 penalties, 84.5 percent of dollars abated) against $13,731,700 thousand in FY2024 and $1,693,095 thousand in FY2023, and estate and gift penalties were $10,670,822 thousand in FY2024 (6,621 penalties) against $724,395 thousand in FY2025.

Open the tool: individual estimated tax penalties, number assessed

What the Data Book counts and does not count

• Recorded in the fiscal year, from any tax year. FY2025 footnote [1]: “Assessments of penalties included here were recorded in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 regardless of the tax year to which the penalties may apply.” Footnote [2]: “Abatements of penalties included here were recorded in FY 2025 regardless of the tax year to which the penalties may apply.” So abatements relate to assessments from any year, and a rate above 100 percent (individual delinquency FY2024; estate and gift FY2025) is arithmetic, not an error.
• Abatement means any reduction. “An abatement is a reduction of assessed penalties.” The grounds listed are IRS error, reasonable cause, administrative and collection costs not warranting collection, discharge in bankruptcy, and acceptance of partial payment, and “Numbers and amounts represent only the portion of assessed penalties that were abated.” Genuine relief and write-offs share a column.
• Nonreturn penalties. Footnote [13] for FY2025: “Represents various penalties assessed and abated for a wide range of noncompliant behaviors, such as noncompliance related to tax return preparers and to information returns”, and “Also includes trust fund recovery penalties.” IRC 6721 and 6722 have no breakout in any year of the series.
• TFRP credits. The same footnote: “The amount of trust fund recovery penalties credited in FY 2025 was $738,943,809 and is included in the amount abated.” A TFRP credit is a payment by one responsible person applied against the others’ assessments, not a finding that a penalty was wrong. The credited amounts in dollars: FY2010 $630.6 million, FY2012 $880.0 million, FY2013 $898.2 million, FY2014 $826.9 million, FY2015 $843.5 million, FY2016 $842.8 million, FY2017 $776.8 million, FY2018 $764.2 million, FY2019 $716.2 million, FY2020 $628.1 million, FY2021 $735.0 million, FY2022 $808.9 million, FY2023 $753.0 million, FY2024 $386.7 million, FY2025 $738.9 million. FY2011 is the exception: that year’s footnote stops after the information return list and says nothing about TFRP, though the FY2011 nonreturn figures ($7,961,917 thousand assessed, $2,270,119 thousand abated) sit in line with the neighbouring years.
• Suppression and rounding. “d—Not shown to avoid disclosure of information. However, the data are included in the appropriate totals.” and “NOTE: Detail may not add to totals because of rounding.” appear every year.
• Not in the table at all. Interest; penalties proposed but not assessed (a Notice 972CG proposal is not an assessment until the response period runs); penalties on returns the IRS never processed; and the reason for any abatement.

Renames and splits across the years

The normalized keys in the tool absorb these: individual_income, business_income (IRS line to FY2016, derived sum after), partnership, corporation, s_corporation, employment, excise, estate_gift, nonreturn; and for penalty types failure_to_provide_information covers the old combined S corporation/partnership information row and the new rows, while failure_to_file_electronically exists only from FY2017.

Methodology

• Source files: the sixteen IRS workbooks (XLS for FY2010 to FY2018, XLSX from FY2019) linked from the IRS SOI index page for the table, downloaded November 1, 2026 and parsed cell by cell. Footnote markers were stripped from labels and kept in a raw label field; the footnote text of each year is reproduced in the tool.
• Suppressed cells (“d”) are stored as not available, never as zero, and rates that need them are not computed. Net figures are assessed minus abated.
• Spot checks against the PDFs: FY2025 totals, the employment delinquency, nonreturn, partnership bad check and estate and gift failure-to-pay rows (Table 4-2, Data Book page 62); FY2019 employment FTD, nonreturn and employment estimated tax rows (Table 26); FY2010 totals, employment FTD, S corporation/partnership information and nonreturn rows (Table 17). All matched after rounding. In every year the tax-type totals sum to the grand total and the visible penalty rows sum to each group total, or fall short only where a cell is suppressed.
• Derived rows are labelled: the business income total for FY2017 on is the sum of the partnership, corporation and S corporation totals; the all-tax-type series excluding employment taxes is total minus employment, computed in the browser when the toggle is on.
• The FY2015 workbook has a second sheet of unrounded working values that was not used; the FY2010, FY2013 and FY2019 workbooks hold fractional thousands, kept to three decimals.
• Attribution of the FY2022 and FY2024 abatement patterns to Notice 2022-36 and Notice 2024-7 is an inference from timing, stated as coincides with; the Data Book does not make it. The FY2025 employment figures are published as printed; the FY2026 Data Book, expected in spring 2027, is the place to look for a restatement.

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