Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: an IRS letter is frightening mostly because it is unlabelled — you cannot tell from the tone whether you are holding a reminder or a deadline. You almost always are holding one of a small number of known letters, and the code in the corner tells you which. Find your code below.
Before you read anything else
Check that the letter is genuine, and note its date. Those two steps take five minutes and protect everything that follows — how to verify an IRS letter without calling the number printed on it, and the four steps that apply to every notice.
The two deadlines that close doors permanently
Most IRS deadlines can be recovered by explaining. These two cannot, and they are the reason to date the letter the day it arrives:
- 60 days — on a math-error notice, to force abatement and restore the Tax Court access the notice removed. The statute says the Secretary “shall abate”: the 60-day right.
- 30 days — on a final notice of intent to levy, for a hearing before an office with no prior involvement in your case, plus Tax Court review of the outcome: Collection Due Process.
Neither restarts. If you do one thing today, work out which of these you are inside.
Find your notice
| Notice | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| CP2000 | A proposal, not a bill – the underreporter notice | decode |
| CP14 | The first balance-due notice, and the automatic disaster-area extension | decode |
| CP11 / CP12 / CP13 | The math-error family – and the 60-day right that restores your Tax Court access | decode |
| CP501 / CP503 / CP504 | The collection ladder in order, and the letter everyone misreads | decode |
| LT11 / Letter 1058 / CP90 | The final notice of intent to levy – and the 30 days that matter most | decode |
One filing obligation catches people who never had a tax to pay at all: a U.S. person receiving more than $100,000 from a nonresident alien individual or foreign estate must report it on Form 3520. The gift is not income; the penalty is still calculated on it — 5% a month, capped at 25%.
What you can actually do about it
Every route below is the IRS’s own or free and public:
- Payment plans — applied for online, without calling or visiting; and applying online costs less than the same plan by phone.
- Penalty relief — the relief most people never ask for, which is becoming automatic in 2026.
- The Offer in Compromise, tested first with the IRS’s own free pre-qualifier.
- The Taxpayer Advocate Service, and Low Income Taxpayer Clinics for representation at free or nominal cost.
If it has reached collection
The ladder in order tells you where you are standing, and a lien and a levy are not the same thing — one is a claim, the other is a taking, and the difference includes a statutory ceiling of 15 percent on continuing levies against Social Security and similar payments.
What this wing will never do
We do not sell tax help, we are not paid if you hire anyone, and we do not name private companies. There is an entire industry built on the moment an IRS letter arrives, and its advertising is louder than anything here.
So the promise is simple and checkable: every route named on every page in this wing is either the IRS’s own or a free public service. If someone contacts you after a notice promising to settle your debt for a fraction of it, that is a sales pitch. The rights described here are free and already yours — and the IRS’s own pre-qualifier will tell you what you actually qualify for, at no cost, before anyone else offers to.
A federal notice and a state one are different machines, and arriving on the same kitchen table does not make them the same problem. State tax notices sorts them by stage — adjustment, proposed assessment, balance due — because the stage is what decides whether the number is still arguable.
Coverage
This is wave one of the wing. The decodes above cover the highest-volume notices; CP49, CP21/CP22, the 5071C identity-verification family and the CP2000 series variants are the next wave, and are named here rather than implied. Every page carries its own sources and read dates.
Honest gap. Nothing here covers audits and examinations, business notices, or state tax correspondence, which follows entirely separate rules. None of it is tax advice.
See methodology and corrections. No advertising appears anywhere in this wing and we earn nothing from it.