Information note 2. When do taxpayers file their tax returns?
The 2025 tax return campaign is currently in full operation. The campaign began on March 11 with the opening of the possibility to request the reference number. A week later, tax data could be accessed, and on April 8th, it became possible to file tax returns through the application. Web Rental.
Campaign results can be monitored in a variety of ways. Firstly, timely information is provided on the progress of the filing of declarations and, in particular, on the implementation of the refunds requested in the Press releases. On the other hand, the monthly collection reports Since May, they have included a section where the campaign is monitored in relation to the income and refunds made up to the corresponding month and the pace at which the refunds are being executed and the payments are being made is analyzed. In it annual report The subsequent campaign is placed in the context of the whole. PIT and finally, the Statistics of the declarants of PITIt includes all the detailed information from the declarations submitted for each year (the results for the year 2024 will be published at the beginning of July).
One question of interest is when taxpayers file their returns: Do they all do it in the end? Are the declarations with favorable results submitted much earlier? Do people whose tax returns show a balance due wait until the last days of the campaign? A quick answer to all these questions would be that the expected behaviors occur (for example, returns are filed before returns that have a result to be paid), but the differences are smaller than one might assume. Furthermore, the pattern of filing returns has generally remained fairly stable over time, although there is a slight tendency toward earlier filing times.
Although when monitoring on a daily basis it seems that the results from one year to the next have nothing to do with each other, once the campaigns are considered from a broader perspective, the conclusion reached is that the filing of tax returns follows a very similar pattern every year, regardless of the trend growth of the returns or the fact that from one year to the next the amounts to be paid or refunded may be very different. This first graph, which shows the percentage of returns filed in the last eight campaigns divided into the three months in which they occurred, serves as an example.
The graph shows the percentage of returns filed in April, May, and June (which includes the first few days of July to account for years in which the campaign ended slightly later due to calendar reasons). As you can see, there are oscillations, but with reduced variability. Logically, the greatest differences occur in April, which is the month most affected by the calendar. Thus, it is possible to find campaigns in which the presentation began on April 1 (2020) and others on April 11 (2023), with the addition that in some of these years Holy Week took place in the middle of the campaign (2019, 2020, 2022 and 2025). Within the stability noted, a slight trend can be seen, particularly visible in the June data, toward earlier filing of tax returns.
Stability is not only observed in the data aggregated on a monthly basis, but also when these same percentages are calculated on a daily basis. The following chart shows the percentage of returns filed on each day of last year's campaign.
The pattern is clear: a high number of submissions in the first few days, which stabilized at just under 1% in the following days and followed an upward trend until the end of the campaign. Even within the weeks, it can be seen that, recurrently, there is a higher presentation in the first half and a drastic decrease on the weekend. It is the pattern that is seen every year. The following graph compares the year 2025 from the previous graph (blue series) with what happened in 2020 (orange series). Similar results are found in the rest of the campaigns.
Logically, the filing rates are not the same for returns with a refund request or with a result to be paid or zero. The following charts show the same information as the initial chart, but now with a breakdown based on the sign of the declaration result.
As expected, the number of returns to be filed shows a greater accumulation in the latter part of the campaign, but this effect is not as pronounced as one might assume. In other words, people who find it difficult to pay do not overwhelmingly wait until the last minute; On the contrary, more than 40% file their declaration in the first two months of the campaign. And something similar can be said about the declarations to be returned: They do not appear as soon as possible, but are distributed almost evenly over the three months. In any case, all the results show the aforementioned tendency to bring forward the presentation.