Here’s a question worth asking before next tax season: If artificial intelligence is now doing most of the grunt work on your return, why isn’t your bill going down?
The work really is getting easier. TurboTax’s maker says its software now automates data entry for about 90% of tax forms and fills in roughly 80% of a simple return before you type a thing.
Less typing. Less time. Less cost for the company doing it.
So your price should be falling too, right?
Don’t count on it. I’ve spent decades watching how this industry operates, and the pattern rarely changes — when technology makes filing cheaper to deliver, the savings don’t reach you. They get kept.
1. The savings are real — and the company is keeping them
Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, just posted the kind of year most businesses only dream about.
Revenue hit $18.8 billion in fiscal 2025, up 16%. Operating income jumped 36% to $4.9 billion, and net income climbed to $3.9 billion. You can read the numbers in Intuit’s own results.
Those aren’t the numbers of a company handing efficiency gains to customers. They’re the numbers of a company banking them.
And here’s the tell: In its annual filing, Intuit credited part of its tax-business growth to “higher-priced” offerings and add-on services like TurboTax Live, which grew 47% in a single year.
More automation. Higher prices. Record profit. See the problem?
2. The free option that could’ve forced prices down just vanished
For a couple of years, there was finally a check on all this: a free, government-run filing tool called IRS Direct File.
It let people with simple returns file straight with the IRS at no cost. In the 2025 season it handled 296,531 returns across 25 states, more than double the year before.
Then it died. The IRS confirmed Direct File won’t be available for the 2026 filing season, with no launch date set for its return.
To be fair about why: supporters of ending it — including House Republicans and the tax-prep industry — argued the program duplicated existing free options, cost too much to run, and was never explicitly authorized by Congress.
Critics saw it differently. Senator Ron Wyden blasted the move as taking from working-class taxpayers to pad the profits of tax-software companies.
Either way, the one free tool that pressured the paid players is gone.
3. Killing it wasn’t luck — it was bought
Direct File didn’t disappear on its own. It was lobbied into the grave.
Intuit spent about $3.9 million on federal lobbying in 2025 — the most in the company’s history, according to the nonpartisan tracker OpenSecrets.
Zoom out and it’s bigger. Across two decades, Fortune reported that the tax-prep giants poured roughly $103 million into lobbying while working to shut down free government filing.
None of this is new. Intuit has spent years working to keep your taxes complicated enough that you’ll pay somebody for help.
In fairness, the industry has an argument: Free options already exist, and the government shouldn’t compete with private business. One tax lobbyist said the IRS should wind Direct File down and focus on modernizing instead.
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4. Remember, ‘free’ hasn’t always meant free
If the word “free” in a TurboTax ad makes you flinch, there’s good reason. Customers have revolted before over charges they didn’t see coming.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that Intuit ran deceptive ads pushing “free” filing that millions of customers couldn’t actually use — and then got steered toward paid upgrades. The FTC laid it out in detail.
Before that, the company agreed to a $141 million settlement to refund 4.4 million customers who paid for a product advertised as free.
When Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office tested the “free” software, it found a sample filer would’ve paid $128 after a string of upsells.
Now, Intuit fought back and, in March 2026, won: a federal appeals court threw out the FTC’s order. But notice what the court actually said. It ruled the FTC’s in-house process was unconstitutional — not that the ads were honest.
Intuit called the FTC’s decision deeply flawed and cast the reversal as vindication. Read the ruling, though, and the deception question was never actually settled in the company’s favor.
5. The upsell is the business model — and AI just makes it smoother
Here’s the part people miss. Intuit doesn’t really sell tax software. It sells a funnel.
The free version pulls you in. Then, the moment your return gets even slightly complicated, the prompts start: upgrade here, add expert review there, pay for peace of mind.
AI doesn’t blow up that model. It oils it. Smarter software spots more moments to offer a paid add-on, more precisely, at the exact second you’re unsure.
That’s how you get a 47% jump in TurboTax Live — the pay-a-human tier — even as the underlying software does more of the work itself.
The automation isn’t replacing the upsell. It’s sharpening the pitch.
6. Don’t count on competition to save you
Normally, when one company holds prices high, a rival undercuts it. That’s the theory, anyway.
In tax prep, the two giants — Intuit and H&R Block — both walked away from the IRS Free File partnership years ago, and both lobbied to end Direct File.
When the biggest players in a market move in the same direction on price and on policy, “competition” stops doing much for your wallet.
And it isn’t only about price. TurboTax has also been caught steering customers into sharing income and debt details that then get used to target them with ads.
What you can actually do about it
You’re not powerless here. A few moves keep the automation dividend in your pocket instead of Intuit’s.
If your income falls under about $89,000, you can still file a federal return free through the IRS Free File program with a partner company — just confirm the current threshold before you start, since it shifts yearly. We rounded up the free filing routes that still work this year.
Comfortable with the forms? IRS Free Fillable Forms are free at any income level. And the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) programs offer free in-person help if you qualify.
Use AI the smart way — to understand your situation, organize your documents, ask questions. Just don’t let it file for you, and don’t assume the “free” button lives up to its name.
The technology doing your taxes keeps getting cheaper to run. Whether that saves you money or just fattens a balance sheet is, for now, still up to you.
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