Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: a CP14 is the IRS’s first balance-due letter — “We sent you this notice because you owe money on unpaid taxes” — and unlike a CP2000 it is a bill. The useful news is that the options for handling it are all free, official, and available online without speaking to anyone.
What to do, in order
- Read it against your own records. The IRS instruction: “Read your notice carefully. It will explain how much you owe and how to pay it.” Payments crossing in the post are a routine cause of a CP14 that is already wrong.
- Pay by the date if you can.
- If you cannot pay in full, apply for a payment plan online — the IRS says plainly you “can apply online for a payment plan (including installment agreements)”. This does not require a phone call and does not require a representative.
- If you disagree, call the number in the IRS Help section of the notice with your documentation ready — cancelled cheques, an amended return, whatever supports your figure.
The automatic extension most people never hear about
If your address of record is in a federally declared disaster area, you get more time and you do not have to ask for it. In the IRS’s words: “you should have received a CP14C notice. This means you have additional time to file your tax return and to make your payment… You do not need to contact us to get this extra time to pay; it is automatic.”
Check the letter code on your notice before you do anything else. A CP14C is not a CP14, and the difference is weeks or months of time you already have.
If paying is genuinely not possible
Two official routes exist and neither costs anything to ask about. Temporary delay of collection: the IRS states that “[i]n cases of financial hardship, the IRS may temporarily delay collection until your situation improves.” And the Offer in Compromise, which the IRS itself links from this notice — its free pre-qualifier tool tells you whether you are plausibly eligible before you spend anything.
Use the IRS’s own pre-qualifier first. It is the same test any adviser would apply, it is free, and it answers the question in minutes.
Every route named on this page is the IRS’s own or a free public one. We do not sell tax help, we are not paid if you hire anyone, and we do not name private companies. If a firm contacts you promising to settle your debt for a fraction of it, that is a sales pitch, not a route.
Sources
IRS, Understanding your CP14 notice, read 2026-08-07. Quotations are the IRS’s own text.
Honest gap. This page decodes the notice and names the official routes. It does not cover interest and penalty computation, the collection notices that follow if nothing is done, or state tax bills.
See methodology and corrections. General information about published law and IRS procedure, not tax advice. No advertising appears on this page and we earn nothing from it.
A CP14 is rung one. If nothing is resolved, the letters that follow arrive in a known order — the collection sequence, and the single letter in it that starts a 30-day clock.
Holding a different letter, or not sure which one you have? Every notice we decode, with the two deadlines that close permanently.