How Many Paid Tax Preparers Have No Credential At All

Updated August 25, 2026. Quick answer: The IRS authorises 879,698 people to prepare federal returns for pay. Its five credential rows add to at most 303,768 people, and it warns that some are counted twice. At least 503,881 of them — 57.3% — hold no credential and no filing-season record, and the IRS’s own FOIA extract of 858,780 preparers agrees at 56.7%. This is legal, ordinary and the majority case.

What is usually said, and what the sources say

Advice about hiring a tax preparer treats a credential as the norm and its absence as a warning sign, and stops there. Nobody says how many paid preparers actually have one.

The IRS publishes the answer twice, in two places nobody reads together, and both say the same thing: a clear majority of the people the IRS authorises to prepare a federal return for money hold no professional credential and no Annual Filing Season Program record. The share is not the same everywhere, and the states where it is lowest are the states that made preparers register.

The IRS publishes the number, in two places, and never together

The IRS keeps a page of preparer statistics. On the copy archived for this page, current as of 08/01/2026, it reports 879,698 individuals holding a current Preparer Tax Identification Number, the number a person must have before being paid to prepare a federal return. Directly beneath it the same page lists the professional credentials those people hold.

Source: IRS preparer statistics page, data current as of 08/01/2026. The five credential rows are added here; the IRS does not print a total.

The addition is deliberately generous to the credentialed side, because the IRS prints a caveat under its own table: “Some preparers have multiple professional credentials and qualifications.” (IRS, Tax Professional Management Office federal tax return preparer statistics). Someone who is both a CPA and an enrolled agent appears in two rows. So 303,768 is a ceiling on the number of credentialed people, not a count of them — at most 34.5% of PTIN holders. Subtract the ceiling and the filing-season records and at least 503,881 people — 57.3% — hold neither.

A second IRS dataset, built for a different purpose, says the same thing

Under the Freedom of Information Act the IRS also publishes the extract itself: one row per PTIN holder with a business address on file, carrying that person’s credential and filing-season indicator. It is linked from the IRS’s own FOIA page and is downloaded here as a single file of 43,873,917 bytes, sha256 393647afbb1d496571de2255d5d93688667bc65fd3d74dd1aa99d8d250cc097c, last modified on the IRS server Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:36:34 GMT.

Derived by counting the extract. Nothing but counts is reproduced: no name, address, telephone number or website from the file appears anywhere on this site.

Two datasets, built years apart for unrelated reasons, land within a point of each other: 56.7% from the extract, a floor of 57.3% from the statistics page. And the IRS said as much in 2014, in the revenue procedure that created the voluntary programme: “While 40% of paid tax return preparers are credentialed as attorneys, CPAs, or EAs, most of the other 60% of paid tax return preparers lack any kind of professional credential or license.” (Rev. Proc. 2014-42, § 2). What has changed in the decade since is the direction. The credentialed share has not risen.

It matters because of the other sentence in the same paragraph: “More than half of the United States’ taxpayers rely on paid tax return preparers to assist them in preparing their federal tax returns annually.” (Rev. Proc. 2014-42, § 2).

Where they are, and how the mix differs

The extract carries a business state for 810,508 of the 858,780 rows. The ten largest:

The spread is the story. In Mississippi 81.3% of preparers have no credential recorded; in Oregon it is 30.6%. That is a gap of 50.7% between two states filing the same federal return.

The states at the bottom of that gap are the states that made preparers register

The IRS’s credential column has a value most people have never seen: SRTP, a preparer registered by a state. It appears 32,411 times, and it is not spread evenly.

The last column removes state registrations and counts only attorneys, CPAs, enrolled agents, enrolled actuaries and enrolled retirement plan agents.

Read the last two columns together, because the fourth column overstates the case. A state that registers preparers mechanically lowers its own blank-credential rate, since the IRS records that registration in the same field. Take the registrations out and California moves from 35.9% to 58.4%, and Oregon from 30.6% to 49.8%. State registration does not turn anyone into a CPA.

What it does is move people out of the column where nobody had to prove anything. In Oregon and California a preparer had to pass something and stay registered. In Mississippi, Texas and Georgia roughly three in four have no recorded credential and no state ever asked. Why that is legal is a 2014 court decision.

One state resists the pattern and is worth naming: District of Columbia has the lowest share of preparers with no federal credential (43.4%) on the strength of attorneys and CPAs alone — only 34 of its preparers are state-registered and nothing else. Registration is one route to the bottom of this table. It is not the only one.

What the letters mean

Counts a person once per credential held, so the column sums to more than the 858,780 rows.

None of this makes an uncredentialed preparer unlawful. The revenue procedure is explicit: “This revenue procedure does not restrict any individual from preparing and signing tax returns and claims for refund” (Rev. Proc. 2014-42, § 3). Preparing returns for money without a credential is the ordinary, legal, majority case. What the credential does change is narrower than it sounds.

The IRS directory cannot show you most of them

The IRS answers How can I check a tax preparer's credentials? by pointing at its directory, which “can help you find preparers in your area who currently hold professional credentials recognized by the IRS, or who hold an annual filing season program record of completion” (IRS, Choosing a tax professional).

Read that against the count above. The directory lists the credentialed and the filing-season participants, which is at most 375,817 of 879,698 people. Absence from the directory is the normal case, not a red flag. It carries exactly one piece of information: that this preparer is not in the group with representation rights. It says nothing about whether they exist, whether they are honest, or whether they are any good.

What this page does not settle

This page counts two IRS datasets and reports what they say. It does not rate any preparer, name a good or bad state, or tell you what to look for.

A PTIN is not a measure of practice. The IRS counts people who hold a current number, not people who prepared a return for pay this year, so both the numerator and the denominator here describe the authorised population rather than the working one. The 2014 revenue procedure quoted above is the only place we found where the government states the split for actual paid preparers, and its 40/60 figure is a decade old.

The two IRS counts have different dates and different coverage. The statistics page is current as of 08/01/2026 and counts every current PTIN holder. The FOIA extract was last modified on the server in March 2026 and contains only holders with a business address on file, which is why it is the smaller of the two. Neither is a sample of the other.

The PROFESSION field records a credential the holder reported to the IRS. We did not verify a single one against a state licensing board, and a blank cell is the absence of a reported credential rather than proof that the person has none.

No page here counts preparers per resident. That comparison would need a population source we did not read, so every state figure is a share of that state's own preparers and nothing else.

Sources

• IRS, Choosing a tax professional — https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/choosing-a-tax-professional
• IRS, Tax Professional Management Office federal tax return preparer statistics — https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/tax-professional-management-office-federal-tax-return-preparer-statistics
• Rev. Proc. 2014-42, § 2 — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-14-42.pdf
• Rev. Proc. 2014-42, § 3 — https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-14-42.pdf
• IRS FOIA consolidated PTIN extract, sha256 393647afbb1d4965, fetched 2026-08-25 — https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/ptin-information-and-the-freedom-of-information-act
• IRS federal tax return preparer statistics, data current as of 08/01/2026 — https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/tax-professional-management-office-federal-tax-return-preparer-statistics

Related: What A Tax Preparer Credential Actually Buys You · Why Nobody Has To Be Qualified To Do Your Taxes · How to respond to an IRS notice.

General information drawn from the federal statutes, regulations, court opinion and IRS datasets named above, not legal, tax or financial advice. Rules change and the IRS republishes these files; the figures here are what each source said on the date above, and each is linked so you can check it.