IRS Adds Citizenship Question to Draft 2026 Form 1040 for First Time

The Internal Revenue Service has added a citizenship and work authorization question to its draft 2026 Form 1040, marking the first time the main federal individual income tax return would directly ask filers about their status.

Under the draft, filers would indicate whether they are a “U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.” Married couples filing jointly would answer separately for each spouse. The yes-or-no item appears near the top of the return in the “Other Information” section, below the section on digital assets.

The language reaches beyond citizenship. Noncitizens with lawful authorization to work in the United States could answer yes, while the draft limits the disclosure to a yes-or-no response.

Federal filing obligations also extend to many noncitizens. Resident aliens generally follow the same federal income tax rules as U.S. citizens, while many nonresident aliens with U.S. tax obligations file Form 1040-NR.

The draft follows months of consideration inside the IRS over adding citizenship information to the 2026 return. Reuters reported in May that officials were reviewing a version that would have asked filers to identify themselves as non-U.S. citizens or dual citizens. The form released this week instead groups citizens and U.S. nationals with noncitizens authorized to work in the country.

Treasury and the IRS are separately proposing immigration eligibility restrictions on the refunded portions of several tax credits. The proposal covers the earned income credit, additional child tax credit, American opportunity tax credit and adoption credit, treating those refunded amounts as federal public benefits under a 1996 law.

A new draft Schedule 3-A tied to those credits asks whether a taxpayer or spouse is a U.S. citizen, U.S. national or “qualified alien” under federal benefits law. That wording differs from Form 1040, which uses lawful work authorization as part of its standard.

Nine days before the Form 1040 draft was posted, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld an injunction against an IRS procedure used to provide more than 47,000 taxpayer records to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The court found the procedure failed to ensure ICE requests satisfied federal requirements governing disclosure of confidential tax information.

Federal tax privacy law tightly restricts when return information may be released to another government agency. The Sept. 8 ruling focused on disclosure of information already held by the IRS, while the draft Form 1040 raises a separate issue involving information collected directly from taxpayers.

Taxpayer advocates raised concerns when the citizenship proposal surfaced earlier this year. Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights and a former national taxpayer advocate, argued that collecting citizenship information could discourage some immigrants from filing federal returns. Treasury has said its proposed restrictions on refundable credits are intended to apply federal public benefit eligibility rules to the refunded portions of those credits.

The IRS cautions that draft forms are released for information and remain subject to federal approval. If the citizenship and work authorization language survives the review process, taxpayers would encounter it on 2026 income tax returns filed in 2027.