IRS civil penalties by the numbers: assessed and abated, by tax type and penalty type, FY2010 to FY2025

The chart and table

The tiles show the selected fiscal year (newest by default). The chart plots the chosen measure for the chosen tax type and penalty type across every year; switch to the log scale when FY2025 flattens the rest, and tick exclude employment taxes to see the all-tax-type series without the employment line. Choosing all tax types with a single penalty type gives a derived sum across the return-related tax types, since the IRS prints no such line. Click a column heading to sort the table. The footnotes panel reproduces the IRS’s own notes for the selected year, which is where the content of each line, the abatement definition and the trust fund recovery penalty credit are stated.

FY2025: read it as printed

The FY2025 edition reports $1,247,074,030 thousand ($1.25 trillion) in civil penalties assessed and $1,210,426,532 thousand abated, 97.1 percent of assessed dollars, against $84,064,300 thousand assessed in FY2024. The Data Book narrative repeats the figure, “$1.2 trillion in civil penalties in FY 2025”, and adds that “The IRS abated $1.2 trillion in civil penalties during the year”. Employment taxes carry 92.3 percent of the assessed dollars: the employment delinquency line alone is $745,116,635 thousand assessed and $745,724,278 thousand abated, more abated than assessed, and the federal tax deposit line is $117,895,214 thousand assessed with 99.4 percent abated in the same year. The counts did not move the same way (4,457,891 employment penalties in FY2025 against 4,410,799 in FY2024), so the dollar jump reflects a small number of very large assessments reversed within the year. The Data Book gives no explanation and no footnote was added; there was no erratum on irs.gov as of November 1, 2026. The figures are published here as printed in the Data Book, with that caveat. TIGTA’s annual report on compliance trends through FY2025 (August 2026) does not mention the penalty figures, and no trade coverage found by November 1, 2026 offers an explanation. The chart above therefore opens with employment taxes excluded; untick the box to see the year as printed.

For scale, the same Data Book says the IRS collected $5.3 trillion in gross taxes in FY2025 (Tables 1-1 and 1-5), so the employment delinquency line alone equals about one seventh of all gross collections. Penalties assessed and reversed in the same year cost taxpayers nothing, but a reader comparing years should treat FY2025 employment figures as an anomaly until the IRS says otherwise.

Keeping a series straight across the renames

The filters use normalized keys so a line can be followed from FY2010 to FY2025; the table shows the IRS’s own label for each year next to the key. The changes absorbed:

• Individual income tax (FY2010 and FY2011) became Individual and estate and trust income taxes from FY2012. The footnote already covered the Form 1040 series and Form 1041 in FY2010, so the content did not change.
• Business income tax(es) (FY2010 to FY2016) was split from FY2017 into Partnership, Corporation and S corporation income taxes. The business income series here continues past FY2016 as a derived sum of the three, marked derived in the table.
• Excise taxes became Excise taxes and tax-exempt organizations and trusts from FY2019 (with a singular organization in that first year); the forms in the footnote are the same from FY2010 to FY2025 apart from Form 8886-T, added in FY2019.
• S corporation/partnership information (FY2010 to FY2016) covered failure to provide information on Forms 1065 or 8752 and failure to e-file Form 1065-B. From FY2017 the partnership and S corporation groups show Failure to provide information and, from FY2018, a separate Failure to file electronically. Before FY2017 the e-file failures sit inside the information line.
• Federal tax deposits appears under individual income taxes only from FY2022 (3 penalties that year, zero after); the individual Other footnote changed in FY2021 to include federal tax deposits alongside missing TINs and unreported tips.
• The table itself moved: Table 17 (FY2010 to FY2018), Table 26 (FY2019 to FY2022), Table 28 (FY2023 and FY2024) and Table 4-2 (FY2025), when the Data Book was renumbered by chapter. The IRS SOI index page for the table says: “In prior editions of the IRS Data Book, Table 4-2 was presented as Table 28.”

What the table counts, and what it does not

• Fiscal year of recording, not 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.” Abatements likewise. An abatement rate above 100 percent is possible and occurs, because the dollars abated in a year relate to assessments from any year.
• Abatement is broad. The IRS lists IRS error, reasonable cause, costs not warranting collection, discharge in bankruptcy and acceptance of partial payment, and says “Numbers and amounts represent only the portion of assessed penalties that were abated.” Relief and write-offs are mixed in one column.
• Information return penalties are not broken out. IRC 6721 and 6722 penalties sit inside Nonreturn penalties with preparer, Form 8300, frivolous return, dyed fuel and trust fund recovery penalties. The footnote ends with the TFRP amount credited in the year, which “is included in the amount abated”: $738,943,809 in FY2025. The nonreturn tile shows that credit so the rest of the abatement can be judged.
• Suppressed cells. “d” cells are stored as not available, never as zero; the IRS says they remain inside the totals, so a tax-type total can exceed the sum of its visible rows.
• Rounding. The FY2010, FY2013 and FY2019 workbooks hold unrounded amounts; the page keeps workbook precision and the PDFs print rounded figures.

Questions practitioners ask