By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

The millions of immigrants who have crossed the border with Mexico since 2020 could change the balance of political power in Congress — but in a way likely to boost Republican states that emphasize border security, at the expense of more welcoming Democratic states.

That’s because many of the new immigrants joined state-to-state movers gravitating to the fast-growing conservative strongholds of Florida and Texas, boosting those states’ populations. California and New York also had large influxes from the border but ended up losing population anyway.

The vastly different population changes threaten to scramble the Electoral College map.

California and other Democratic states lost immigration-related population gains when residents moved away during the COVID-19 pandemic or while seeking jobs and housing. Where did those state-to-state movers go? Florida and Texas, in large measure.

Republicans have long accused Democrats of encouraging immigration for their electoral benefit.

But the shift is likely to help Republican-leaning states in the next decade: The Constitution allocates congressional representation by population — including noncitizens. Every 10 years, the country counts its people and then shuffles the number of U.S. House seats given to each state.

In presidential elections, each state has the same number of electoral votes as it does congressional representatives.

Several experts contacted by Stateline agreed that after the next decennial census in 2030, California is likely to lose four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas is likely to gain four.

Adam Kincaid, president and executive director of the GOP-founded American Redistricting Project, said the changes could dramatically alter the Electoral College map, with the Midwest no longer a “blue wall” against Republican presidential victories if the region loses three seats, by his calculation.

On the plus side for Democrats, he said, immigration helped stem population losses in many blue states.

But it’s hard to predict the next five years, Kincaid said. Housing is expensive and hard to get in states such as California and New York, he noted, while also blaming Democratic “policies that drive where people want to live.”

“I don’t think anybody rationally expects Florida and Texas to grow as rapidly through the decade as they did during COVID,” Kincaid said. “We’ll all be wrong. These are only forecasts and things will change.”

House seats

Three forecasts for 2030 — one provided to Stateline by Jonathan Cervas, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University; one from Kincaid’s American Redistricting Project; and one from William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution — all show Democratic states in the Northeast and West losing House seats while fast-growing, mostly Republican states in the South and West gain seats.

In addition to the representation changes in California and Texas, Florida would gain either three or four seats in the U.S. House, depending on the forecast, while Illinois and New York each would lose either one or two seats.

Other possible gains would go to Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah, depending on the forecast. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin might lose seats.

The forecasts were developed from new census population estimates that attempt to show where millions of border migrants went since 2020, based on court records showing ZIP codes of residence.

Florida, Texas and California each got around a million immigrants, many from the border surge of 2022-2024. But California’s gain was offset by 1.7 million people moving away to other states, including Texas, while Florida and Texas gained from both immigration and state-to-state movers.

Similarly, New York gained 750,000 people from immigration but lost 1.1 million as New Yorkers moved out of state.

Party leaders are paying close attention to the details.

Republican states could gain more seats in the U.S. House after decennial redistricting in 2030, assuming heavily Republican states like Florida and Texas remain that way. More people are moving to those states, including immigrants and state-to-state movers from Democratic states.

The new census estimates show the lion’s share of new immigration since 2020 going to Florida, Texas, California, New York and New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of migrants also went to other states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina and Washington.

It’s likely that many of the migrants who landed in California and New York ended up moving to Texas and Florida, where there were more jobs and affordable housing available.

The largest single state-to-state migration flow between 2022 and 2024 — about 171,000 people — was from California to Texas, according to a Stateline analysis of a separate Census Bureau release. There was another large flow, of about 122,000 people, from New York to Florida.

The February state population estimates, delayed from their usual release in December by the government shutdown in October, also used court records to adjust immigration numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau located millions of asylum-seekers, parolees and other “humanitarian migrants” who entered the country between 2022 and 2024 based on the ZIP codes they provided to immigration courts.

That’s a change from 2024 estimates, when the Census Bureau added humanitarian migrants to the total but assumed they had gone to places with historically high immigration.

“That assumption was convenient but implausible,” said Jed Kolko, an economist and undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Biden administration.

But as it turned out, Kolko added, “The humanitarian migrants were more likely to come over the border and then settle in places anecdotally known for providing services, like New York City and Denver.”

The result of sharpening the picture with court records: Some states got more immigration added for 2020-24 (130,000 for New York, 32,000 for Colorado, 30,000 for Texas), and some had it subtracted (104,000 fewer for Florida, 70,000 for California, 39,000 for Michigan) in comparison with older estimates.

Five years and beyond

With border crossings from Mexico at their lowest level in 50 years in fiscal 2025, it’s hard to chart the next five years and predict 2030 population, which will ultimately decide House representation.

Adding to the uncertainty is the unprecedented nature of the stress on population since 2020: pandemic restrictions and dislocations, followed by large-scale immigration during a labor shortage, a clamping down at the border late in the Biden administration, and then President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan that was just ramping up in mid-2025.

Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer, agreed that “the second half of the decade could be wildly different from the first half,” noting that state-to-state moves and immigration both dropped off between 2024 and 2025. That diminishes both of the drivers of Southern state population growth.

“My guess is, if this continues, Texas and Florida would benefit less in Electoral College gains,” Frey said. If immigration remains sharply curtailed, Texas could gain only three seats and California could lose only three, he said.

The overall trend would still see fast-growing, mostly Republican states getting more congressional representation, Frey said. But with lower immigration, “the contrast in red-blue state reallocation is still there but not as sharp as before.”

State demographers in Florida and Texas say they’re uncertain about what kind of growth the states might see in the next five years.

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Florida estimates its own population using electricity usage to gauge the number of new residents, which shows more recent growth in the past couple of years than the Census Bureau does, said Richard Doty, a research demographer with the state Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

In the coming years, Florida growth could stall for various reasons, including higher housing prices and high insurance costs from recent storms.

“Florida is no longer the bargain it once was,” Doty said. “The cost of housing in particular is driving young people and retirees to other states.”

In Texas, the large drop in immigration between 2024 and 2025 — down almost 50% from about 355,000 to 167,000 — will curb future growth, said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter.

“If we look at next year, I think we’re going to see immigration to the United States take a very significant decline, and then that’s obviously going to affect Texas because immigration is such a big part of our population change,” Potter said.

That will likely extend to legal immigrants, such as the tech workers on high-skill visas who have moved to Texas cities and suburbs, he said.

“There’s a tendency for potential immigrants, legal immigrants, to perhaps be a little more reticent now, given what seems to be happening in terms of immigration enforcement in the United States,” Potter said.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2026 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MATT HUDSON, Montana Free Press

In 2020, a northcentral Montana hemp crop was harvested, beginning a trial run by two Montana companies to produce clothing without the material ever leaving the United States.

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When the shirt finally went to market last year, it was proof of a concept that had long since moved overseas.

Hemp is often held up as a versatile crop with all sorts of applications: fabrics, home insulation, even edible seed oils, to name a few. But it was illegal to grow or distribute hemp in the U.S. for nearly a century until 2018 when Congress lifted federal restrictions on the marijuana-adjacent plant. So, when a Fort Benton hemp processor and a Great Falls-based apparel company sought to make a line of U.S.-made hemp shirts, they had to scrap together a supply chain to make it happen.

“Honestly, it was just: Can we do it? Because it hadn’t happened in, arguably, 100 years,” Morgan Tweet, co-founder and CEO of IND Hemp, told Montana Free Press. “No one had grown (hemp) fiber and been able to process it to a quality that they were able to spin with in the U.S.”

IND Hemp was formed in 2018 and started producing hemp seed oils from regionally grown crops for various food applications. But hemp-based textiles, known for their sturdiness, were on the company’s radar, and after two years of planning, IND started up its fiber production line in 2022.

It was around that time that Great Falls-based apparel company Smith and Rogue approached IND with a proposal. The brand is an offshoot of the North 40 Outfitters chain of farm and outdoors supply stores, which is also based in Great Falls and has 12 stores across the northwestern United States.

Smith and Rogue already had hemp-based clothing lines, but those were produced internationally. Brandon Kishpaugh, apparel merchandiser at Smith and Rogue, was interested in the possibility of a clothing line that didn’t leave American borders.

“We saw there was a demand for a more durable, more sustainable, higher quality fiber,” Kishpaugh said. “And now it’s how do we get it sourced in the U.S.?”

It was a stroke of luck that a hemp fiber processor opened up less than an hour away in Fort Benton. But that was just one early step in a long manufacturing chain.

FROM PROHIBITION TO PRODUCTION

Despite being illegal for much of the 20th century, hemp is intertwined with American history. Grown by founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, it was seen not only as a reliable crop but also a source of domestic pride amid boycotts of British goods during the American Revolution.

Hemp fiber ready to be shipped to the Carolinas where it will be made into fabric is seen in the at the warehouse Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Fort Benton, Mont. (Lauren Miller/Montana Free Press via AP)

Hemp is a sibling of marijuana, although modern hemp has tiny levels of the psychoactive chemical that’s sought in the recreational drug. But the two were the same in the eyes of Congress, which passed a prohibitive tax in 1937 that outlawed both plants. Aside from a brief U.S. government push for hemp-based rope, parachutes and water hoses during World War II, industrial hemp production shuttered in America for the rest of the century.

The Montana Legislature legalized the cultivation of industrial hemp in 2001, but it didn’t spark a green rush. It wasn’t until 2009 that the state issued its first industrial hemp license to a Bozeman medical marijuana business.

Like medical marijuana, hemp remained federally prohibited and languished in jurisdictional purgatory. Montana’s hemp licenses included language that warned about the plant being federally illegal, and the DEA declined at first to recognize Montana’s industrial hemp law. Another licensed hemp farmer near Helena saw her crops die in 2017 because she couldn’t get access to federally controlled water.

Congress relaxed its stance in 2018 and lifted the restrictions on industrial hemp through that year’s farm bill, and Montana farmers harvested 2,400 acres of hemp in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That makes Montana a middling state for hemp production, beaten out by larger producers such as South Dakota, Texas and California.

The prohibition is gone ( at least for now ), but over the preceding decades, the institutional knowledge around hemp production largely disappeared in the United States. In addition, American textile manufacturing of all kinds witnessed precipitous declines around the turn of the century.

Sofi Thanhauser, author of the book “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing,” told MTFP that prolonged prohibition made it difficult for hemp to return to American clothing manufacturing. What was left of the industry centered mostly on cotton. Hemp was more like a niche material, sometimes more difficult to process, and U.S. companies weren’t equipped to handle it.

“Over time, that infrastructure has disappeared,” Thanhauser said. “And so it’s really hard for companies who want to do supply chains in the U.S., because a lot of the time the equipment and expertise is not here.”

IND’s main fiber-processing equipment was manufactured in France, where a stable European hemp industry has existed. The Fort Benton plant is dedicated to a process called decortication, which separates the outer fiber material, called bast, from the hemp straw’s woody core, called hurd. The machines are massive and can process five tons per hour.

After hemp cultivation became federally legal in 2018, Tweet said lots of people started growing the plant. Few were getting into fiber processing.

“We are still always optimizing our line,” Tweet said. “But there’s not a playbook. You can’t really call up a company and say, ‘We want to make hemp fiber for T-shirts’ and they say, ‘I’ve got you covered.’”

THE SHIRT

Smith and Rogue’s test run for an American-manufactured line of clothing was limited — initially, 239 men’s work shirts. Kishpaugh said he focused on a shirt for this experimental run because it was something his New York sewing contractors could work with.

“I wanted to go with something very heritage, very workwear,” he said. “I knew our factory could execute.”

The result was the Benton work shirt, a $150 piece of clothing made from a blend of IND’s Montana-grown hemp fibers and cotton grown in Arizona. The raw fibers traveled from Fort Benton and Arizona to North Carolina to be refined and blended. The material was then sent to another North Carolina company for spinning before heading to South Carolina for weaving. The fabric was finished in Georgia before being trucked to New York City for cutting and sewing.

The difficult part wasn’t finding the companies to work with, because there are few players in American textiles. The challenge was convincing some of the companies to fit a small run of hemp-based material into their schedules.

“We were able to piece this thing together, which made it very costly,” Tweet said. “The fiber moved probably 10 more times than it had to, and freight is your biggest enemy in all these things.”

More than 97% of clothing sold in the United States is made overseas. The efficiencies of overseas production lie in scale, labor costs and experience in making modern clothing. But there are many examples of exploitative or dangerous conditions for the workers who meet the demands of a quick-turn, affordable fashion industry.

While smaller operations are coming online in the United States, some parts of the process require highly specialized equipment that startups may not be able to afford.

“It’s things like the spinning mill that turns the fiber into thread that is hugely capital-intensive and involves huge, complicated machines,” author Thanhauser said. “And also the weaving, the spinning mills. You can’t, as a small business, just buy a couple of those.”

For the Benton shirt, nearly every step required a different company. That affected the cost of the final product, but it also cost time. When Kishpaugh received a prototype in the fall of 2024 that didn’t fit right, fixing the issue meant going back through multiple hands to refine the shirt.

The Benton shirt may have debuted early in 2025, but a shipment of finished fabric went missing en route to New York City. The roll of textiles — one of the first domestic hemp fabric runs since prohibition that was painstakingly coordinated across multiple states — vanished and hasn’t been found.

“So there’s 600 yards of this historic fabric that’s warehoused somewhere,” Tweet said.

The process was once again delayed, but thankfully, there was enough additional fabric to resume production.

Smith and Rogue debuted the shirt in December, both online and in its affiliated retail stores, along with a marketing plan to showcase the effort put into it.

“You can’t just put it on the rack,” Kishpaugh said. “If you don’t know what it is, it’s just going to look like another button-up shirt. And then you look at the price tag.”

The $150 price reflects the costs of the USA manufacturing chain, Kishpaugh said, adding that Smith and Rogue’s margin isn’t as strong on this shirt as some of the company’s other clothing made overseas. He said there is a segment of consumers who respond to marketing about a USA-made shirt, even at that price.

“That is hard for some people to come to grips with,” he said. “This is $150, and this is why. We have to pay for all those other touch points.”

LINKS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN

Stacks of hemp age in the IND Hemp warehouse Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Fort Benton, Mont. (Lauren Miller/Montana Free Press via AP)

The hemp for the Benton shirt run was grown in 2020 at a Meissner family farm north of Fort Benton. The fiber material was part of a crop primarily meant for other products IND was producing at the time.

“What we probably didn’t appreciate then that we most certainly do now is how much agronomic impacts and the variables that happen in the field affect the finished quality,” Tweet said.

Those factors are numerous. The variety of hemp chosen, planting density, harvest timing, soil microbes and annual precipitation all influence the crop’s suitability for textile production. There are some quality factors that Tweet can control at the Fort Benton processing plant. But if a bad crop comes in, that’s what they have to work with.

It took years to refine that process to routinely receive higher-quality hemp fibers, Tweet said. The ability to use those early 2020 crops for a shirt that was released in late 2025 was a proof of concept. Today, IND has more consistent quality fibers for use in textiles.

“No one has at scale been able to decorticate and get fibers to a point that they can be spun,” Tweet said. “Maybe it’s a reach to make that claim, but I am hard pressed to find something else.”

Plans for the second-generation Benton shirt are underway, Kishpaugh said. He hopes to scale up the process to produce larger quantities and a wider range of clothing, including outerwear and pants. He said the experience gained from producing the Benton shirt could help bring costs down a bit, but Kishpaugh and Tweet said a hybrid model is also a good avenue for Montana hemp.

“We have good factories overseas that we work with,” Kishpaugh said. “And if we can get the hemp to them, they’re set up to do the bibs, jackets. Now we’re just using American-sourced hemp versus overseas hemp.”

The constraints of cost and scale still limit growth in domestic manufacturing.

“Will there always be these opportunities to promote a full domestic supply chain? Absolutely,” Tweet said. “But they’re never going to be able to serve the larger demand to get it into everyone’s closet.”

This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Edward Lotterman

Our nation is in a dangerous economic situation this year. A financial crisis worse than that of 2007-09 is now possible, because of the ways markets have developed, and because the Federal Reserve let this happen.

Some economists, including me, believe that, over the last 40 years, Fed policies have amplified, rather than diminished, the size of inevitable problems.

We have crawled out on a rotten limb from which it is difficult to get down. To understand how this peril came to be, we’ll continue the abbreviated history of banking and its regulation that we began last week.

In 1913, the year my mother was born, the U.S. economy was the largest, most diverse and most complex economy in the world. The population had tripled in the 50 years since the Civil War. Huge land areas were wrested from Native Americans and devoted to farming, mining and lumbering.

We had passed the United Kingdom and then Germany in steel production. We had the world’s largest rail network and were the largest producer and exporter of agricultural, forest and mining output. Germany led in industrial chemicals and the U.K. had a larger merchant fleet, but there was no question our nation was now the dominant global economic power.

But we still punched below our weight in finance. London remained the center of that world. We had thousands of commercial banks accepting deposits and making loans, plus investment banks that issued and traded corporate stocks, corporate and government bonds as well as organizing mergers. Writing life and property insurance was a healthy and dispersed sector.

However, at the micro level, our large, fragmented banking sector had many bank failures. These pauperized depositors and devastated local economies. Damage to the economy was not just among those who lost funds. The very possibility that such failures could occur forced the population as a whole to be defensive in how they saved. This made use of capital for the whole economy less efficient.

Also at the macro level, periodic financial crises involving large financial institutions hit the general public as “panics.” Frauds or defaults at the top of the economic pyramid rapidly spread downward. Contracting output and employment caused widespread suffering in the general public.

Historians identify at least seven such panics between 1865 and 1910. Those in 1873, 1893 and 1907 were particularly severe. Recovery from ensuing recessions took years, including four, three and five years respectively for the three harsh ones cited. Again, exposure to frequent and unexpected crises forced all businesses to take preventive measures, again reducing overall efficiency in our nation’s use of capital.

The problem was that we lacked a central bank like the Bank of England. We had experimented with two separate Banks of the United States, but these were very imperfect and each vanished after an initial 20-year charter expired. President Andrew Jackson’s refusal to renew the charter of the second in 1833 touched off a recession lasting eight years.

Periods of sharp inflation and harsh deflation were a third problem of the 1800s. Naïve people today still think that tying their money to gold and silver guarantees price stability. That ignores history. If output grew faster than supplies of these metals, output prices and wages had to fall, while mortgages and other debts still had to be paid. If the supply of metals grew faster than output, more money chased a limited quantity of goods. Inflation set in.

The U.S. dollar was once tied to the value of gold and/or silver. Consumer prices went up 34% in six years after the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and by 30% during the Alaska gold rush. More harshly, prices inexorably fell by 52% between 1864 and 1884. Farmers who got mortgages to buy land saw prices of wheat, cattle and other products fall year after year. For a half century, “the Depression” referred to that period from the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s. That is why hard times in the 1930s are now called the “Great Depression” to distinguish them from the “Long Depression” of the late 1800s.

Many during this time saw the need for a central bank to regulate the money supply, to provide liquidity to meet seasonal variations in the credit needs, or stem panics in financial markets. However, a thorny issue prompted divisions that went back to the 1820s. Small businesses and households feared a Wall Street financial leviathan. And Wall Street did not want anything to do with Washington or government.

The Panic of 1907, though short, scared everyone. The ensuing recession remained fresh at the 1912 elections. Financiers and lawmakers arrived at a compromise and the Fed was created.

There would be 12 central banks rather than one. Each would be an entirely private corporation chartered in the state where located. Commercial banks could choose to join this system by buying shares of stock in their regional Fed bank in proportion to their capital and deposits. Such “member banks” would vote to choose a board of directors for the regional Fed that would hire day-to-day managers.

The new banks would be Federal Reserve Banks because they would hold the reserves — deposits minus loans — of commercial banks. Banking regulations specified these meet at least a minimum percentage of deposits, but amounts could be larger.

Such central depositories for each region’s banks streamlined check clearing. Most importantly, these reserve accounts created a means to achieve the “elastic currency” seen as necessary to prevent bank failures, generalized financial crises or crippling deflations and inflations.

At that time, virtually all business loans from main street banks were “callable.” The promissory notes borrowers signed included clauses that if the bank gave notice, the borrower would have to repay the loan in, say, 10 business days regardless of original date due. This was so a bank facing many withdrawals could get cash to meet withdrawals. Ceasing payment would cause a bank to fail. But farmers who had borrowed for a crop or merchants who had ordered inventory for peak seasonal sales did not have cash. That was the dilemma that had plagued the economy for decades.

With a regional reserve bank, any commercial bank, especially small ones, could go to that regional Fed and borrow funds to tide them over. As collateral, they could present promissory notes for loans they had made to local borrowers. If the small town bank failed to repay the Fed, that new institution could collect directly from farmers, mines, lumber companies or merchants when their operating loans came due.

To protect the new Feds, these would not loan funds equal to the total value of the promissory notes presented as collateral. These would be “discounted.” And the borrowing bank would have to pay interest. If a bank came with $100,000 in promissory notes for loans made to customers, the Fed might loan only $95,000. The Fed office making such loans was called the “discount window.” The rate of interest charged on them was the “discount rate.”

If a regional Federal Reserve bank wanted to increase liquidity so commercial banks could lend more freely, it could lower the discount rate. Raising it was a signal that it wanted to tighten credit.

Now comes the crucial factor that makes a central bank a central bank and gives it power over the economy as a whole. When a regional Fed bank made discount window loans to its member commercial banks, it created the loaned money out of the air. It just made a pen and ink entry in its ledgers. It simply increased the amount of money in that bank’s reserve account on paper. It could draw down as needed as long as above the required minimum.

Nothing had to come from the Treasury or any Wall Street entity. It was pure money creation from nothing. The money supply for the nation increased.

The counterpoint was that when a borrowing bank repaid its discount loan, the money simply disappeared. Nothing went to the U.S. government or Wall Street. But the nation’s money supply shrank.

This is hard for econ students to get their heads around. Yet it was what the Bank of England or Sweden had been doing for centuries. It is essentially what every central bank around the world does today.

Moreover, while some terms have changed, it happens every day. The “discount window” still exists and there still is a “discount rate.” But it is dwarfed by another source of newly created Fed money.

On the last business day of 2025, Wall Street banks borrowed $74.6 billion from the New York Fed’s “Standing Repo Facility.” Instead of promissory notes from farmers, loggers and hardware store owners, this huge sum was collateralized with $31.5 billion in Treasury bonds and $43.1 billion in mortgage-backed securities — yes, those same instruments of debt that caused the 2007 crisis. That last category is part of the rotten limb on which we are now perched. But one more column is needed to tie this all together.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By ADRIANA MORGA

NEW YORK (AP) — Tax season is underway and you have until April 15 to file your return with the IRS. If you want to avoid the stress of the looming deadline, start getting organized as soon as possible.

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“Don’t wait until the last minute but also don’t rush,” said Tom O’Saben, director of tax content and government relations at the National Association of Tax Professionals,

Gathering all your documents, signing up for direct deposit and keeping copies of your tax returns are some of the best practices when it comes to preparing to fill out your taxes. This year, due to the Republican tax and spending bill that President Donald Trump signed over the summer, there are new deductions taxpayers should know about.

Among them are no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, deductions for car loan interest, and deductions for people who were 65 or older by Dec. 31, said Miguel Burgos, a certified public accountant and an expert for TurboTax.

The average refund last year was $3,167. This year, analysts have projected it could be $1,000 higher, thanks to changes in tax law. More than 165 million individual income tax returns were processed last year, with 94% submitted electronically.

If you find the process too confusing, there are plenty of free resources to help you get through it.

Here are some things you need to know:

Gather your documents

While the required documents might depend on your individual case, here is a general list of what everyone needs:

—Social Security number

—W-2 forms, if you are employed

—1099-G, if you are unemployed

—1099 forms, if you are self-employed

—Savings and investment records

—Any eligible deduction, such as educational expenses, medical bills, charitable donations, etc.

—Tax credits, such as the child tax credit, retirement savings contributions credit, etc.

To find a more detailed document list, visit the IRS website.

O’Saben recommends gathering all of your documents in one place before you start your tax return and also having your documents from last year. Taxpayers can also create an identity protection PIN number with the IRS to guard against identity theft. Once you create a number, the IRS will require it to file your tax return.

Know some of the changes for this year

— Change to standard deduction

The standard deduction for single taxpayers is $15,750 for this year. For married couples filing jointly, it has increased to $31,500. For heads of households, the standard deduction is $23,625.

— Change to state and local taxes (SALT) deduction

The deduction cap on state and local taxes has increased from $10,000 to $40,000. The change is also known as the Working Families Tax Cut and was enacted in July 2025.

“This is a big benefit, especially for states like California, New York, and New Jersey, that have a higher state income tax,” said Keith Hall, president and CEO of the National Association for the Self-Employed and a certified CPA.

The SALT deduction is a federal tax deduction for some state and local taxes paid during the year. The total deduction had been capped at $10,000 since it started in 2018.

People who have not previously itemized their SALT deduction might want to consider it this year. To know if you should itemize your deductions, O’Saben recommends that you ask yourself the following questions: Did you pay state taxes? Did you pay property taxes? Do you have mortgage interest? Do you have charitable contributions?

—Deductions for tips

What is known as “no tax on tips” is not quite accurate. This new deduction is only for qualified tips and is subject to income limitations.

“It can be cash, it can be electronic as well. But the main thing is, hey, it has to be voluntary (tips),” Burgos said.

The maximum annual deduction is capped at $2,500. The deduction phases out for taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income over $150,000, or $300,000 for joint filers. The tax deduction is also limited to specific industries where tipping is common practice. Some of the included industries are bartenders, food servers, musicians and housekeeping cleaners.

To claim the new tax break, you will need to fill out a new tax form called Schedule 1-A.

—Additional Schedule 1-A deductions

Schedule 1-A is an IRS form used to claim and calculate four tax deductions originating from the tax and spending bill. They are the change in state and local tax deduction, deduction on qualified tips, and car loan and senior deductions.

Look for resources

IRS Direct File, the electronic system for filing tax returns for free, will not be offered this year. For those who make $89,000 or less per year, IRS Free File offers free guided tax preparation; you can choose from eight IRS partners, such as TaxAct and FreeTaxUSA.

Beyond companies such as TurboTax and H&R Block, taxpayers can also hire licensed professionals, such as certified public accountants. The IRS offers a directory of tax preparers across the United States.

The IRS also funds two programs that offer free tax help: Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE). People who earn $69,000 or less a year, have disabilities, or are limited English speakers, qualify for the VITA program. Those who are 60 or older qualify for the TCE program. The IRS has a site for locating organizations hosting VITA and TCE clinics.

Avoid common mistakes on your tax return

Many people fear getting in trouble with the IRS if they make a mistake. Here’s how to avoid some of the most common ones:

—Double-check your name on your Social Security card

When working with clients, O’Saben asks them to double-check their number and their legal name, which can change when people get married.

“If you got married last year and you now want to use your married name, that married name doesn’t exist if you haven’t filed it with Social Security,” O’Saben said.

—Search for online tax statements

Many people opt out of physical mail but when you do, it can also include your tax documents.

“These documents may actually be available online because you may have chosen to have paperless contact. And because of that, you may need to go get those documents yourself,” O’Saben said.

—Make sure you report all of your income

If you had a second job in 2025, you need the W-2 or 1099 form for each job.

In general, if you make a mistake or you’re missing something in your tax records, the IRS will audit you. An audit means that the IRS will ask you for more documentation.

Know about the child tax credit

Currently, the tax credit is $2,200 per child but only $1,700 is refundable. This refund is called the Additional Child Tax Credit. To claim the Additional Child Tax Credit, you must have at least $2,500 of income for the tax year.

You qualify for the full amount of the Child Tax Credit for each qualifying child if you meet all eligibility factors and your annual income is not more than $200,000 ($400,000 if filing a joint return). Parents and guardians with higher incomes may be eligible to claim a partial credit.

You can find more details about the child tax credit here.

Avoid paper checks for your tax refund

Last September, the IRS began phasing out paper tax refund checks. If you’re expecting a tax refund, the IRS recommends you sign up for direct deposit.

Avoid tax scams

Tax season is prime time for tax scams, O’Saben said. These scams can come via phone, text, email and social media. The IRS uses none of those means to contact taxpayers.

Sometimes scams are even operated by tax preparers, so it’s important to ask lots of questions. If a tax preparer says you will get a refund that is larger than what you’ve received in previous years, for example, that may be a red flag, O’Saben said.

If you can’t see what your tax preparer is working on, get a copy of the tax return and ask questions about each of the entries.

Keep copies of your tax returns

It’s always good practice to keep a record of your tax returns, just in case the IRS audits you for an item you reported years ago. O’Saben recommend keeping copies of your tax return documents five to seven years.

The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.