The IRS in numbers

The IRS publishes two staffing numbers, and they do not match

This is the first thing to get straight, because almost every public argument about IRS staffing quotes one of these figures without saying which.

Full-time equivalent positions realised is a measure of work-years. It counts the hours actually worked over the fiscal year and divides by a full-time schedule, so a seasonal employee who works four months counts as a third of one. In FY 2025 that figure was 95,226.

Employees in pay status at the end of the fiscal year is a headcount on a single day. It counts bodies, full-time or not, who were on the payroll on 30 September. In FY 2025 that figure was 80,967 — 14,259 fewer than the FTE count.

IRS staffing since 1996

The IRS is smaller than it was thirty years ago. It reported 106,642 full-time equivalents in FY 1996, fell to a low of 73,519 in FY 2018, and stood at 95,226 in FY 2025 — −10.7% across the period. Its peak in this series is the first year of it: 106,642 in FY 1996.

Over the same period gross collections went from $1.49 trillion to $5.31 trillion, +257.5% in nominal terms. Staff down, collections up several times over: the work per employee, measured crudely in dollars collected, has risen sharply. How much of that is productivity, how much is a larger economy, and how much is automation of things that used to be done by hand, these figures cannot say.

What it costs to collect a dollar

The IRS publishes its own efficiency measure: the cost of collecting $100 in tax. We reproduce the published figure rather than recomputing it from the two money columns — recomputing would round differently and put two slightly different numbers for one statistic into the world. (We do check that the two agree when the data is loaded; if they ever stopped agreeing, the import would fail rather than publish.)

It stood at $0.36 in FY 2025. Across this series it has ranged from $0.29 in FY 2022 to $0.53 in FY 2010. It is worth reading with care: the denominator is total collections, so the ratio improves whenever the economy grows, whether or not the agency became more efficient. It is a measure of both at once.

What IRS employees actually do

The popular image of the IRS is an auditor. The staffing breakdown is mostly not that. Answering phones, processing returns and running the computer systems account for far more people than examination and criminal investigation combined.

The IRS in the context of the federal government

In FY 2025 the IRS collected $5.31 trillion in gross terms against total federal outlays of $7.01 trillion — 75.8% of what the government spent. The two figures are not directly comparable as a surplus-or-deficit calculation: collections are gross, before refunds, and outlays are net. But the order of magnitude is the point. One agency brings in most of the money the entire federal government spends.

It does that as part of the Treasury Department, and it is most of it: on the OMB staffing table Treasury employed the equivalent of 111,000 full-time civilian staff in FY 2025, of which the IRS accounts for roughly 85.8%. The comparison is approximate — the two agencies publish on slightly different bases — but it is why the Treasury line in the staffing table tracks the IRS so closely.

What it is not is a large share of federal spending. The agency’s entire operating cost is 0.27% of federal outlays. Treasury’s position near the top of the spending table is about interest on the federal debt, not about tax administration.

The full series

Common questions