Tax Day 2025: The Original Form 1040
U.S. Income Tax Day arrives on April 15 in 2025. And since you’ve probably been racing to complete your 2024 federal income tax returns, what better way could there be to celebrate the most dreaded day on the American calendar than by filling out yet another income tax form?
Before you start pounding the back button or swiping left, there’s nothing for you to worry about! You won’t have to pay any more income taxes than what you already have reported on whichever version of IRS Form 1040 you’re filing this year. Instead, we’ve built the following tool to transport you in time back to 1913, where our tool will estimate how much your federal income taxes would be if that year’s income tax rules still applied.
Why 1913? That’s the year the Internal Revenue Service first issued its infamous Form 1040. We’ve modeled our tool after the first page of the original Form 1040, which back then, consisted of just four pages:
- The summary sheet modeled below (Page 1),
- the Gross Income calculation sheet (Page 2),
- the General Deductions sheet (Page 3), and finally,
- one page of Instructions (Page 4).
Yes, you read that right. Paying U.S. income taxes used to only require one page of instructions!
We’ll make it even easier. All you need to do is to enter the indicated data (shown in boldface type, in the rows with a white background), using your figures from this year that should still be very fresh in your memory, and we’ll take care of the math! The tool will display its calculated results in the rows with a gray background, where you won’t have to worry about entering any values.
If you are accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click here to access a working version of the tool on our site. Now, if you’re ready, let’s get to it!…