The Chronicles Of Grant County
When Filing Your Tax Documents, Be Aware Of New Postmark Policy At The Post Office
The Year 2025 Federal individual tax returns are due on April 15, 2026. (The image was provided courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service.)
While many Americans use software programs to file their income taxes with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), some Americans still fill out paper documents and mail those tax documents to the IRS.
For the latter group of people, please take note of changes made by the United States Postal Service (USPS) – changes that the USPS stated aren't really "changes" – that may leave you subject to interest and penalties from the IRS.
This, even if you do everything correctly: Filling out the appropriate tax documents. Determining if any taxes are owed. Sending the tax documents and any taxes owed to the IRS on or before April 15.
You may think you've done everything you're supposed to do to file and pay your taxes.
Unfortunately, you may be wrong.
According to a statement from the IRS, if you mail in your tax documents, "Your return is considered filed on time if it is sent in an envelope that is properly addressed, has enough postage, is postmarked and deposited in the mail on or before the due date."
That last part of the sentence – "…is postmarked and deposited in the mail on or before the due date" – used to mean one thing to almost all Americans – except, of course, the leadership at the USPS: When you provided the USPS with your envelope addressed to the IRS with the proper amount of postage on or before April 15, your envelope would be postmarked on the date you provided the envelope to the USPS and would be considered "timely mailed, timely filed" by the IRS.
No more.
A postmark no longer means that a piece of mail was provided to the USPS on the date it was presented to the USPS.
According to the USPS, the postmark never meant that.
Americans who believed that if they mailed an envelope with their tax documents on April 15 – handed to a postal official on their route, left in your mailbox to be collected by a postal official, presented to a postal official in a post office station, or dropped off in a postal mailbox that had not yet had its contents collected by a postal official – that their envelope would be postmarked on April 15, well, those Americans were just plain wrong.
The USPS explicitly stated that the following statement is/was a myth:
"Postmarks show when and where the Postal Service took possession of my mail."
To "correct" the erroneous beliefs of almost all Americans, the USPS formally defined "postmark" in the latter part of 2025.
As of Christmas Eve of 2025, the USPS fully implemented its official rule that postmarks are applied by automated machines at Regional Processing and Distribution Centers.
According to a statement issued by the USPS on January 2, 2026, "The Postal Service has not changed and is not changing our postmarking practices, which have been consistent since we began moving away from hand-canceling every item at Post Offices decades ago. Postmarks are generally applied by machines at our originating processing facilities and will continue to be applied at those facilities in the same manner and to the same extent as before. Postmarks applied at those facilities will continue to contain the name or location of the facility that applied the postmark and the date on which the first automated processing operation was performed on that mailpiece."
"While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed," the USPS statement continued. "This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer's mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location."
This means that if you live in any one of the communities in the four counties in Southwest New Mexico, you should not wait until April 15 to present your envelope with your tax documents to the USPS.
Provide the USPS with your envelope containing your tax documents – and any taxes you owe – several business days in advance of April 15; April 9 or April 10 probably would be best.
But that is no guarantee that the postmark will include a date prior to April 15.
To make certain that an envelope you want to send through the USPS has a postmark on it with a date that is the same date as you provide the envelope to the USPS, you must go into a post office and explicitly request that a postmark with that date be manually applied to the envelope by a representative of the USPS.
It is best to wait at the counter and confirm that a manual postmark is being affixed to an envelope.
The USPS does not charge to have a manual postmark applied to an envelope.
If you prefer, you could choose to not affix any postage on your envelope prior to going to a post office. Instead, you could pay for the postage at the counter in the post office and ask that rather than using postage stamps, request a postage label – a label that would include the date of that transaction at the post office.
If you so choose, you could also pay additional fees – beyond the postage – to the USPS for additional services. For example, you could send an envelope by Certified Mail or Registered Mail. You could also pay for a Certificate of Mailing. Other postal services also have the date you provide an envelope to the USPS. For example, Express Mail. These additional services, of course, also come with additional fees.
Unless you explicitly request that a postal clerk at a post office manually affix a postmark to your envelope, purchase the necessary postage and have a mailing label with the date of the transaction affixed to your envelope, or pay for additional services that include the date of the postal transaction, it is not at all certain that you will have met the "timely mailed, timely filed" guidelines of the IRS.
You may, therefore, be subject to interest and penalties from the IRS.
Consider these "changes" – again, not "changes" according to the leadership of the USPS – when you read the last part of the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address spoken by President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863:
"…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."
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© 2026 Richard McDonough
