Quick Tips
Robinhood is Living Up To Its Name As It Adds Free Tax Filing
Throughout this tax season, I’ve observed a major trend. First, I saw that PayPal was partnering with a service called April to deliver a free tax filing option to users. Mere days later, OnePay announced a similar initiative with the same provider. And now, Robinhood is jumping on the bandwagon, launching its own offer with April.
This week, Robinhood announced that customers will be able to file their 2025 federal and state taxes for free (with no hidden fees) thanks to the April platform. Of course, this feature will be available through April 15, 2026. Apparently, this feature is rolling out to Robinhood customers — although I have yet to find it in the app as of this writing.
Having peeked at April’s offerings via PayPal and OnePay, it seems to be a pretty straightforward tool. More importantly, I haven’t encountered anything that would suggest this free filing offer is limited to super easy returns, such as 1040s only. However, I did finally find this page that better details what types of forms they support.
Over the years, more and more free tax filing platforms have popped up to take on the likes of H&R Block and TurboTax (which do offer some free filing, but typically only for federal returns and for a limited number of tax situations). The first free option I personally remember seeing was Credit Karma Tax, which was sold to Cash App and appropriately renamed Cash App Tax. That change came after Credit Karma was acquired by Intuit — AKA the company that happens to own TurboTax! Anyway, I actually used Cash App Tax last year and thought it was fine, although it did lack some of the helpful direction I’m used to with TurboTax.
Something I’ll note, though, is that most services only charge you when you go to file. Thus, if you find these free options to be a bit confusing, you might be able to do a dry run with a paid service and then try to retrace your steps with the free platform in order to save money.
With those other apps that I use and now Robinhood adding April’s services, there’s pretty much no chance that I’ll be paying to file my taxes this year. That’s great news, as I really hate paying hundreds of dollars on top of what I already owe in taxes! So, I look forward to giving April a shot — through Robinhood or otherwise — in the next few weeks.
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