Cash App Taxes Review: Completely Free Federal and State Filing

It's entirely free to prepare and file your federal and state taxes using Cash App Taxes. Just note that the service lacks certain forms (such as Form 2210 for underpayment of estimated taxes) and doesn’t support specific situations (including multistate returns and foreign earned income). FreeTaxUSA, which provides more guidance and thorough coverage of tax topics, is also free for federal filing; however, state preparation and filing costs $15.99. It offers unlimited expert help for $44.99.

Most tax preparation sites offer a free version, but the tax situations they support are very limited (H&R Block provides the most comprehensive one). The most expensive competitor I tested, TurboTax, costs $99.99 for federal and $39 for state returns if you are self-employed. Those prices are likely to increase later in the filing season. Generally, the more you pay to prepare and file your taxes, the stronger the support system and the better the user experience.

Before you can create a Cash App Taxes account, you have to sign up for Cash App, a free peer-to-peer mobile payment app that lets you send, receive, spend, store, and invest money. Its account creation and login processes are slightly more complicated than with other tax apps, but this gives me more confidence in the application's security.

Like all tax preparation services, Cash App Taxes takes control of the filing process like a human tax preparer would. It asks you questions, and you answer by checking boxes, entering data, or selecting options. It performs all necessary calculations in the background, then enters your answers on the correct lines of the appropriate IRS forms and schedules. After you provide your household’s personal information, you report your income, move on to deductions and credits, and, finally, miscellaneous tax issues. When you finish the federal section, Cash App Taxes transfers relevant data to any state returns you must file, allowing you to complete them. Before you file your return, the site reviews it for errors and potential missed deductions.

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Cash App Taxes isn’t as chummy as sites like TurboTax and doesn’t converse with you. Instead, it takes a straightforward approach and goes with an almost sparse look (though it uses space better and is more visually appealing than Liberty Tax and Jackson Hewitt). I like the user experience a lot. Its no-nonsense tone and look might appeal if you just want to prepare your taxes as quickly as possible and without any fanfare or much help.

The site’s home page displays a comprehensive list of tax topics organized by type, including Family Credits, Independent Contract Work or Self-Employed, and Investments. Competitors provide separate home pages for major sections, such as income and deductions. Either approach works fine.

Navigating from this consolidated home page to individual tax topics is easy. I never got lost, and it was easy to return to the home page at any time. Cash App Taxes is blazingly fast, too. That’s one thing you give up with more expensive tax prep solutions. Those pretty graphics and other interface conventions can slow down your progress.

I'm disappointed that the site doesn't display a running tally of your tax obligation or refund on internal pages like competitors do. The only place I saw it was on the home page.

Although you can’t import 1099s like the paid sites allow, you can upload a photo of your W-2. Qualifying customers who sold bitcoin on Cash App in 2025 can also import those transactions directly.

As you might expect from a free product, Cash App Taxes offers limited help. It's nothing like what you get with H&R Block or TurboTax. Many lines on the interview pages contain links to explanations of the current tax topic, but these explanations obscure the screen rather than appearing in a vertical pane to the side. Context-sensitive FAQs are available on some pages. Otherwise, you can access the Tax Help Center, a searchable collection of support articles. Some of these articles pertain to the current topic, but others deviate from it (the same is true in other tax apps).

Occasionally, Cash App Taxes directs you to IRS materials, which somewhat defeats the purpose of using a tax prep service in the first place (though everyone else does it). Email help is available for procedural questions, but the company doesn’t offer professional tax guidance like several competitors. So, if you anticipate needing a lot of help in complex areas like investment sales and energy credits, or you’re a tax neophyte, think twice about using this site.

After answering a series of basic questions about your business or gig work, such as the type of work you do and what accounting method you use, Cash App Taxes inquires about your self-employment income. It starts with the 1099-K (which concerns payments through services like PayPal and your credit cards), asking you to enter the information from the form you received. Easy stuff.

This page also prompts you to fill out its 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC forms if you received them or have relevant income to report. An additional field allows you to enter gross receipts and sales that don't appear on tax forms (such as cash and checks); you must manually tally these. I appreciate how Cash App Taxes consolidates all the typical sources of self-employed income reporting on a single, concise page. I also like that the company beefed up the help related to self-employment since last year.

Separate sections guide you through additional self-employment topics, including business use of home and vehicle expenses. You report general business expenses, like advertising and office supplies, on another set of pages. Cash App Taxes explains each expense more than some competing sites do. I don’t see why you couldn't use the app if you just have to report gig or other self-employment income, unless other aspects of your tax profile are complex.

Cash App Taxes looks for data entry errors during the interview process and won’t let you advance until you fix them. The site stopped me when I didn’t enter a payee address on a 1099-NEC, and when I tried to get energy credits for installing exterior doors. It conducts a final review, first looking for deductions you might have missed and errors that may have slipped through. It caught that I hadn’t completed the Qualified Business Income deduction section, for example.

Cash App Taxes is an authorized e-file provider that adheres to the IRS's business, privacy, and security standards. The company's safety measures include 128-bit or higher encryption, a dedicated on-site security team, independent third-party monitoring of the site for vulnerabilities, and support for multi-factor authentication. Every time I logged in, Cash App Taxes sent me an email to verify that I was indeed the one trying to sign in. That got kind of annoying, but it’s a smart security protocol.

The mobile apps (available for Android and iOS) are a little difficult to find because you have to log into Cash App and then click on your account’s balance to get to the menus that take you to Cash App Taxes. The mobile app experience is very similar to that of the browser-based version. Some content is in a slightly different position, and some pages require a bit more scrolling; however, this is also common with other apps. Otherwise, it feels responsive, looks great, and uses the same data entry conventions as the desktop version.

Help works the same way, too, though content takes up a whole page instead of overlapping it or appearing in a side pane. You shouldn't have any issues using the mobile Cash App Taxes app to file, though the same caveat as with the desktop version applies to help resources. Because the browser-based version is so simple and clean, its matching apps easily accommodate even complex tax topic data entry.