As of the IRS’s most recent update, the IRS issues 80% of Form 1023-EZ determinations within 22 days and 80% of Form 1023 determinations within 191 days, or about six months. But those headline numbers are not your wait. The IRS also publishes a second number, the date it is currently assigning applications, and as of the June 28, 2026 update it had only assigned Form 1023 applications submitted on or before January 12, 2026 and Form 1023-EZ applications submitted before February 24, 2026. Read together, a Form 1023 filed today realistically means six months at the very best, and a Form 1023-EZ means four to five months, not three weeks.
Most founders misdiagnose this in one of two ways. Either they see “22 days” on the IRS website, promise a donor a determination letter by next month, and end up apologizing in September. Or they assume the wait is dead time and put the whole organization on pause until the letter arrives. Both are expensive mistakes, and the second one is worse. The wait is not a red light. In most cases you can keep operating and keep fundraising, and if you filed inside the window I explain below, the deductibility of those gifts is generally preserved once you are approved.
I file and launch nonprofits for a living at Next Level Nonprofits, and I have helped launch dozens of organizations over more than a decade in this sector. The single most common question I get after we hit submit is some version of “so when do I hear back?” Here is the honest answer, with the actual arithmetic.
The Two Numbers the IRS Publishes, and Why You Need Both
Go to the IRS page Where’s my application for tax-exempt status? and you will find two different kinds of numbers for each form.
Number one is the determination time. This is a percentile, not an average. As of the page’s June 28, 2026 update:
- Form 1023-EZ: 80% of determinations within 22 days
- Form 1023-EZ requiring further review: 80% within 120 days
- Form 1023 (long form): 80% of determinations within 191 days
- Form 1024: 80% within 210 days
- Form 1024-A: 80% within 229 days
- Form 8940: 80% within 215 days
Number two is the assignment date. This is the cutoff for applications that have actually been handed to an exempt organization specialist. As of that same June 28, 2026 update:
- Form 1023-EZ: assigned through applications submitted before February 24, 2026
- Form 1023-EZ requiring further review: working cases submitted January 26, 2026
- Form 1023 (long form): assigned through applications submitted on or before January 12, 2026
If you submitted after those dates, the IRS tells you plainly: “Your application has not yet been assigned. Please check back later.”
The IRS does not say whether those determination-time clocks start at submission or at assignment, and that matters enormously. So treat the assignment date as your hard floor, since nothing can happen before your file is picked up, and treat the 80% figure as the best case after that.
A quick sanity check that proves the point. If the 22-day EZ figure ran from the day you submitted, the IRS could not simultaneously be four months behind on assigning EZ applications. So for the EZ, at minimum, that clock is measuring something other than your total wait. Plan accordingly.
One more thing before we do the math: everything here is education, not legal or tax advice for your organization. Processing times move, state rules differ, and your facts are not the example’s facts.
Do the Math on Your Own Application
Here is how to turn those two numbers into a date you can actually put on your calendar. I will use June 1, 2026 as the filing date so you can follow the arithmetic and then swap in your own.
Step 1: Measure the queue. Subtract the assignment date from the date the IRS page was last updated.
For Form 1023: June 28, 2026 minus January 12, 2026 is 167 days. That is roughly five and a half months sitting in line before a human opens your file.
For Form 1023-EZ: June 28, 2026 minus February 24, 2026 is 124 days. Roughly four months in line.
Step 2: Add the queue to your filing date.
Form 1023 filed June 1, 2026, plus 167 days, means assignment around November 15, 2026.
Form 1023-EZ filed June 1, 2026, plus 124 days, means assignment around October 3, 2026.
Step 3: Add the processing time.
For the EZ, add 22 days to October 3 and you land around October 25, 2026. That is roughly five months from filing, for the form everyone calls the fast one.
For the long form, you get a range, because the IRS does not say where the 191-day clock starts. If it runs from submission, June 1 plus 191 days lands on December 9, 2026, about six months. If it runs from assignment, November 15 plus 191 days lands on May 25, 2027, closer to a year. I do not know which reading is correct and neither does anyone else outside the IRS. Budget for the long one and be pleasantly surprised.
Notice what happened with the EZ. The advertised number was 22 days. The realistic number was about five months. The processing was never the bottleneck. The line was. That gap is where founders get hurt, because they made promises based on the wrong number.
Three honest caveats. First, these lags are a snapshot from a page the IRS updates periodically, and they move in both directions. Recalculate with today’s numbers before you promise anyone anything. Second, the 80% figure means one in five applications takes longer, sometimes much longer. Third, this arithmetic is my read of two numbers the IRS publishes without explaining how they fit together. It is a planning tool, not a promise.
Why Your Wait Is Longer Than Your Friend’s
The IRS receives over 115,000 applications for tax-exempt status and other determinations each year, and processes them in the order received. Staffing and volume drive most of the delay, and you control neither.
What you do control is whether your application generates a second round. The IRS publishes its own top ten list of things that shorten the process, and every item on it is a delay you inflicted on yourself. Here is that list, condensed:
- Paying the wrong user fee (their number one reason)
- Not attaching a complete, state-filed copy of your organizing document and all amendments
- Describing your purpose instead of your activities, which is the mistake I see most often. Do not restate the mission. Walk the examiner through who, what, when, where, why, and how
- Missing schedules, missing pages, missing financial data
- An accounting period end date that does not match your bylaws
- No bylaws attached, when you have adopted them
- Missing names, titles, and mailing addresses for officers and directors
- The wrong person signing. It must be a director, trustee, or principal officer, electronically on Pay.gov. Your representative cannot sign for you
Here is the WHY that makes all of this worth the effort. If your application is complete and clean, an examiner can approve it without ever contacting you. If it is not, you get a request for additional information, and your file goes back into a queue behind everything filed since. One missing attachment can cost you three months. That is the whole game.
And if your organizing document is the problem, you have a bigger issue than timing. I wrote a full walkthrough of that in Why Did the IRS Reject My 501(c)(3) Application?
The Clock You Should Actually Care About: 27 Months
This is the part almost nobody knows, and it changes how you should think about the entire wait.
If you file your exemption application within 27 months from the end of the month in which you were legally formed, the IRS recognizes your exempt status retroactively to your date of formation, per Publication 557. Miss that window, and your exempt status is generally effective only from the date you filed, unless you can show good cause for an extension.
Run that through what it means on the ground. Say you incorporated on March 10, 2026 and filed Form 1023 on June 1, 2026. Your approval letter shows up in December. That letter reaches back to March 10, 2026. Every donation you accepted in April, May, June, and every month you were waiting is treated as a gift to a 501(c)(3).
The nine months between incorporating and holding that letter did not cost you nine months of fundraising. They cost you nine months of certainty, which is a real cost but a completely different one. And the 27-month rule is the reason that, for most founders I talk to, the answer to “should we wait to launch?” turns out to be no.
Count your own deadline carefully. Formed on March 10, 2026 means the clock runs from the end of March 2026, so your outside date is roughly the end of June 2028. Do not cut it close.
What to Do While You Wait
Fundraise, honestly. You can ask for money while your application is pending. Tell donors plainly that your 501(c)(3) status is pending and that deductibility depends on approval. Most donors handle that fine. What they do not handle fine is finding out later.
File your Form 990 anyway. This one blindsides people. If your annual return comes due while you are still waiting, you must still file it. Check the box on page 1 of Form 990 or 990-EZ indicating that your application for exempt status is pending. If you have more than $1,000 in unrelated business income, you also file Form 990-T. Skipping returns because “we are not approved yet” is how organizations get themselves automatically revoked before they ever get recognized.
Check your state’s charitable solicitation rules. Registration requirements before you can publicly solicit donations vary by state, and many states do not wait for your federal letter. Check your state’s rules before you launch a public campaign.
Check Tax Exempt Organization Search. Your approval letter often posts to TEOS before the paper copy reaches your mailbox. Search yourself before you call anyone.
Build the fundraising engine. This is the real answer. Most founders spend the waiting period refreshing a status page. The ones who come out of the wait with momentum spend it building donor relationships, testing their pitch, and defining a first project small enough to actually finish. None of that requires a determination letter.
Can You Speed It Up?
Sometimes, and less often than you would like.
Form 1023-EZ cannot be expedited. Period. The IRS states this directly.
For Form 1023, expedited handling is discretionary and requires a compelling reason. The IRS says compelling reasons include the following three, which means the list is examples and not a closed set, in its guidance on expediting application processing:
- A pending grant, where losing it would adversely affect your ability to continue operating
- A newly created organization providing disaster relief to victims of an emergency
- IRS errors that caused undue delay in issuing your determination letter
If you are requesting expedited handling on a pending grant, the IRS wants specifics: who is giving the grant, how much, the exact date it is forfeited or redirected, and what happens to your operations without it. “We really need it” is not a compelling reason. A named funder, a dollar amount, and a hard deadline is.
The request must be in writing and must fully explain the reason. And read the IRS’s examples of requests that did not qualify before you write yours. The pattern in those examples is that intending to serve disaster victims is not enough. You have to show an immediate need you are actively meeting.
When to Contact the IRS, and How
Do not call early. It will not help and you will not learn anything.
Contact the IRS only if both of these are true: you submitted before the current assignment cutoff date on the “Where’s my application” page, and your approval letter is not showing on TEOS.
When you do call, have your organization’s name, EIN, the form you submitted, and the submission date from your Pay.gov confirmation email ready. You must be an officer or director authorized to represent the organization. A tax professional will generally need a Form 2848 or Form 8821 on file.
- Phone: 877-829-5500
- Fax: 855-204-6184
- Mail: Internal Revenue Service, EO Determinations, Attn: Manager, EO Correspondence, PO Box 2508, Room 6-403, Cincinnati, OH 45202
The IRS does not accept email inquiries about application status.
One more thing worth knowing about the EZ. If you file Form 1023-EZ and the IRS determines you were not eligible to file it, they reject the application and send you a letter explaining why. That is not a delay, that is a restart, and the user fee is nonrefundable. I have written before about why the EZ is riskier than it looks in Why You Shouldn’t Use Form 1023-EZ for Your Nonprofit.
Saying it once more, because this section is the one people act on: processing times change, state rules vary, and this article is education, not legal or tax advice for your specific situation. When a real deadline or real money is on the line, have a professional look at your file.
FAQ: What Founders Ask Next
How long does 501(c)(3) approval take in 2026?
As of the IRS’s June 28, 2026 update, the IRS issues 80% of Form 1023-EZ determinations within 22 days and 80% of Form 1023 determinations within 191 days. But the IRS had only assigned EZ applications submitted before February 24, 2026 and long-form applications submitted on or before January 12, 2026. Adding the queue to the processing time puts a realistic total at roughly four to five months for the EZ, and at least six months for Form 1023, potentially longer depending on where the IRS starts its 191-day clock.
Why does the IRS say 22 days when everyone says the EZ takes months?
Because there are two clocks. The 22-day figure describes how quickly determinations are issued, and the assignment date tells you how long the line is before your file gets picked up. Add them together and you get your real wait.
Can I accept donations while my 501(c)(3) application is pending?
Generally yes. If you file within 27 months of the end of the month you were formed, IRS recognition is retroactive to your formation date, which makes donations received while pending deductible. Be upfront with donors that your status is pending, and check your state’s charitable solicitation registration rules before soliciting publicly.
Do I have to file a Form 990 while my application is pending?
Yes. If your annual return comes due before you receive a determination letter, you still file, and you check the box on page 1 of Form 990 or 990-EZ indicating that your application for exempt status is pending.
Can I expedite my 501(c)(3) application?
Form 1023-EZ cannot be expedited. Form 1023 can be, at the IRS’s discretion, for a compelling reason. The IRS’s examples include a pending grant whose loss would affect your ability to operate, a newly formed disaster relief organization meeting an immediate need, and IRS errors that caused undue delay. The request must be in writing and must fully explain the reason.
What should I do if my application is taking longer than the published times?
First confirm you submitted before the current assignment cutoff on the IRS “Where’s my application” page, and check Tax Exempt Organization Search in case your letter already posted. If both check out, call 877-829-5500 with your organization name, EIN, form type, and the submission date from your Pay.gov confirmation.
Key Takeaways
- The IRS publishes two numbers, and you need both. The determination time (22 days for 80% of Form 1023-EZ filings, 191 days for 80% of Form 1023 filings) and the assignment date, which as of June 28, 2026 was February 24, 2026 for the EZ and January 12, 2026 for the long form.
- Add the queue to the processing time and the realistic wait is roughly four to five months for Form 1023-EZ and at least six months for Form 1023, possibly longer. The EZ is not a three-week form.
- Most of the delay is volume, not you. The IRS handles over 115,000 applications a year in the order received. What you control is whether your file is clean enough to be approved without a single follow-up question.
- The 27-month rule is the clock that actually matters. File within 27 months of the end of your formation month and your exemption reaches back to your formation date, which means the wait costs you certainty, not deductibility.
- Do not pause your organization. File your Form 990 if it comes due, tell donors your status is pending, check your state’s solicitation rules, and build your fundraising engine while you wait.
Find What’s Standing Between Your Nonprofit and Sustainability
The wait is not the thing standing between you and a sustainable nonprofit. What you do with the wait is. Track where your application actually sits with the free IRS Nonprofit Application Wait Time Tracker, then spend the months you are waiting building the donor relationships that will still be there long after the letter arrives. If you want the full sequence in the right order, grab the SUSTAINABLE Nonprofit Startup Checklist and find what is standing between your nonprofit and sustainability.
Dan Johnson is the founder of Next Level Nonprofits and creator of the Impact Fundraising System. A 4x nonprofit founder and former impact evaluator, he has raised nearly $4 million for small and medium nonprofits and helped launch dozens of organizations built to last.
