For the vast majority of American taxpayers, an IRS audit is something that happens to other people. If you earned less than $200,000 and filed a straightforward return, your odds of being examined were roughly 1 in 1,000, according to the IRS’s fiscal year 2023 Data Book, Table 17, the most recent complete edition available as of June 2026.
But two groups sit well outside that comfort zone, and they could hardly be more different from each other. Filers reporting more than $500,000 in income faced an audit rate of about 1 in 30. And at the opposite end of the income scale, some of the lowest-earning taxpayers in the country also saw elevated scrutiny, largely because claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit trigger automated reviews the IRS counts as examinations.
That pattern, high audit rates at the top and a surprising spike near the bottom, with a wide valley of near-invisibility in between, has persisted for years. It shapes who worries about the IRS and who never gives it a second thought.
Where the IRS concentrates its firepower
Table 17, published as part of the IRS’s annual Publication 55-B, compares the number of individual returns filed for a given tax year against the examinations opened or completed on those returns. One important wrinkle: audits can stretch across multiple years, so a return filed in 2024 might not be examined until 2026 or later. The table captures both closed and in-progress cases, meaning the coverage rate for any single tax year can inch upward as more audits wrap up.
At the top of the income ladder, scrutiny intensifies sharply. The IRS’s compliance-presence statistics show that filers reporting $10 million or more in total positive income for tax year 2019 faced an examination coverage rate of 11%, or roughly 1 in 9. That figure is now several years old and the IRS has not published a comparable update for more recent tax years, but it still dwarfs the sub-0.1% rate applied to the broad middle of the filing population.
The financial stakes explain the focus. Table 17 reports the “recommended additional tax” that examiners propose after a review. For the largest income categories, those recommended amounts can run into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per return. When a single high-income audit can recover more revenue than thousands of routine reviews combined, the allocation of scarce enforcement staff follows the money.
The EITC paradox at the bottom of the scale
A 2022 Government Accountability Office review of IRS audit patterns documented what tax researchers have flagged for years: resource constraints and EITC compliance checks have kept some lower-income audit rates stubbornly high, even as coverage of middle-income filers has dropped. The GAO found that certain low-income groups faced audit rates comparable to, and in some years exceeding, those of filers earning $200,000 to $500,000.
The mechanics are straightforward. EITC claims frequently trigger correspondence exams: automated letters asking a filer to verify income or dependents. These contacts count as audits in the IRS’s statistics, even though they bear little resemblance to the multi-month, in-person field audits that high-income filers sometimes face. A correspondence exam is cheaper for the agency to run, which is precisely why it persists at scale.
For a working parent who receives a letter questioning a $3,000 credit, the distinction between a correspondence exam and a field audit is academic. The stress of gathering pay stubs, childcare records, and school enrollment documents under a deadline feels plenty real, and the consequences of not responding, losing the credit entirely, can hit a family’s budget hard.
Why these numbers are slipperier than they look
Several quirks in the data make it difficult to draw clean trend lines from the headline rates.
The IRS once published a separate audit-rate table, known as Table 9b, that tracked examination coverage by adjusted gross income and fiscal year. The agency discontinued it after fiscal year 2019, breaking a data series that researchers and policymakers had relied on for decades. No publicly available replacement restores that AGI-based timeline, leaving a gap in the long-term picture of how audit rates have shifted across income groups.
The income brackets in the current Data Book also require careful reading. Table 17 groups returns by “total positive income” rather than adjusted gross income. The $200,000 and $500,000 thresholds cited above align with the table’s general bracket structure, but definitional differences can shift returns across category lines and subtly change the apparent audit rate.
Then there is the blurring line between a traditional audit and an automated notice. As the IRS has moved more enforcement work into computer-driven systems, Table 17 and the compliance-presence statistics lump field audits, office audits, and correspondence exams together. That bundling can inflate or deflate the overall coverage rate depending on how you define a “real” audit, and it makes the EITC spike at the low end look even more pronounced relative to the field-audit-heavy rates at the top.
What this means for filers in 2026
If you earn a salary, take the standard deduction, and have no complex investments, your chance of being audited remains extremely low. The risk rises meaningfully once a return involves high income, large or unusual deductions, business pass-throughs, or significant capital gains.
If you claim the EITC, the single most important thing you can do is keep documentation of your eligibility: proof of income, records showing where your qualifying children lived, and any childcare receipts. The IRS’s automated screening flags a disproportionate share of EITC returns, and responding quickly with solid records is the fastest way to resolve a correspondence exam.
Accurate reporting and organized recordkeeping remain the best protection regardless of income bracket. Nothing in the audit-rate data suggests that filers should change how they report; it simply reveals where the IRS points its limited resources and why.
How IRS enforcement is shifting
The audit-rate landscape is not fixed. Funding allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act has given the IRS resources to hire enforcement staff and upgrade technology. The agency has publicly committed to increasing audit coverage of high-income individuals, large partnerships, and corporations while holding rates steady or reducing them for filers earning under $400,000.
Whether that pledge holds will show up in future editions of the Data Book and in independent analyses from the GAO and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. As of June 2026, the most recent complete examination data still reflect activity from before the hiring surge took full effect. The real test of whether the IRS’s enforcement balance is shifting will come when audit statistics covering tax years 2023 and 2024 are published in the years ahead. Until then, the 1-in-1,000 versus 1-in-30 gap remains the clearest snapshot of who the IRS is watching and who it is not.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
