How to reach a human on the IRS account management line

The IRS account management phone queue is the agency's most popular help line, receiving more than 30 million calls a year. It handles more than 85% of the IRS's phone traffic because its agents can help with most things you can't do yourself on the online IRS portal. Unless you have a specific need that has a dedicated phone line, you should start out with the account management queue. The agents there are very helpful and knowledgeable and can redirect you to the right resources — if you can get them on the phone.

Unfortunately, that is what this guide is about: it is incredibly difficult to get through to a human on the IRS account management line. Accurate numbers describing how difficult it really is to talk to a human are hard to come by. I wonder if that is intentional.

Because it is so difficult to reach a human at the IRS, we should do as much work ahead of time as possible. If we are unprepared we may need to call twice. Being prepared means doing as much independent research as possible, writing down clear questions, and thinking through the answers we might get and our follow-ups.

We should also make sure we are ready to make the necessary time commitment to reach a human. I would recommend reserving at least 2 hours for this purpose. And we should make sure that we remain in an area with good phone service — we don't want a bad connection to cause us to disconnect or to make the call unusable.

Our first major obstacle in reaching a human at the IRS is the courtesy disconnect. If you follow the script above to reach the account management queue, you will very likely hear a message like this:

"We are sorry but due to extremely high call volume in the topic you requested we are unable to serve your call. Goodbye."

This is known as a "courtesy disconnect". Courtesy disconnects happen because the IRS limits the number of callers in the phone queue to 1,000. If there are already 1,000 people waiting to talk to an agent, you will not be able to enter the queue and you will hear the courtesy disconnect message.

Every time someone leaves the queue because they either give up or they finish their call with the agent, that opens up a spot for someone else to enter the queue. Every time we use the script above to enter the queue, we have a chance of getting a spot in the queue. However, we are competing with other callers who are also trying to enter the queue so even if there is a spot open, someone else may get it before we are able to do so.

Because there is always a chance that a spot in the queue is open when we call, the basic strategy for getting past courtesy disconnects is to attempt to enter the queue over and over again until we get lucky. This process is quite unpleasant because we never know how many attempts it will take. It could take 3 or it could take 80 and we have no way of knowing.

One thing we can control is when we make our attempts. Some times of day are very busy with tons of other callers to compete with. Other times are a bit quieter, with less competition for spots. You can see the current best times to call on our live dashboard.

But how does the IRS know our local time? It doesn't. It infers our local time from our phone number's area code. This is a tricky caveat, so here is an example.

I live on the west coast, so my local time is Pacific time. But I am from Iowa, so my phone number has a 319 area code. The IRS assumes I am still on Central time because of my area code, so the queue it puts me in opens at 7AM Central time — which is 5AM where I actually live.

I don't want to get up at 5AM to call the IRS over and over. One way around this is to use a service like Google Voice, which lets you get a free phone number in the area code of your choosing.

We have used the techniques above and we can now reach the account management queue. Unfortunately, there are more problems to navigate. One of the most unpleasant parts of IRS queues is that they disconnect you automatically if you are in the queue for more than two hours. I don't know exactly why they do this, but be mentally prepared for it. The automated system also gives an estimate of how long you should expect to wait — ignore this estimate, because it is not accurate.

Sometimes we are offered a callback option when we enter the queue. I highly recommend that you take it if it is offered. The callback experience is faster, more consistent (it avoids the two-hour disconnect), and more pleasant. The system gives an estimate of when the callback will happen, and those estimates are accurate. The callback system tries to reach you three times, with 10 minutes between each attempt. You are on hold after you accept the callback, but it is a very short hold. Callbacks are great — but remember that they are not always offered.