FedWorld Tax Form Search


Select the file format you wish to retrieve the file in:

Enter the type of tax form you are searching for:

PDF=Adobe Acrobat PS=Postscript PCL=Printer Control Lang SGML = Standard Generalized Markup Lang.
See About the File Formats for a few more details.

NOTE: This utility searches only the titles of the tax forms and not the actual contents of the forms.

NewFLASH NEWS! from the IRS concerning Important Information on Certain Federal Tax Products

About the File Names and Types

Most tax documents produced by the IRS come in three flavors: Instructions, Publications and the actual Form. File names for each of the files start with either i, p, f, followed by the number of the form. For example: i1040, p1040 and f1040. If you know the number of the form you want, your search is easy: simply type in the number of the form. If you only want to see the instructions, put an i before the number.

You can also search on keywords, like extension, home, mortgage, travel, capital gains, etc... This works very nicely, but these words have to appear in the title of the form for the search to be successful.

Once you've picked your search term, choose the type of file format that you wish the file to be in and hit the submit button.

About the File Formats

There are four types of file formats which can be downloaded: Portable Document Format (PDF), Post Script (PS), Printer Control Language (PCL) and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML ).

PDF files can be viewed and printed by using Adobe's Acrobat software. You can fetch various flavors of Acrobat from FedWorld. Acrobat is available for Windows, Macintosh and some Unix computers. If you select PDF as your format of choice, please note that you will be getting "hits" on prior year forms and pubs, so please read the titles carefully before downloading a big file only to find out that it's last years form!

Most HP printers will accept the PCL files nicely and many HP printers can also print the postscript files. Sometimes you can do this by sending a document to your printer. In the world of DOS, you do this by using the DOS copy command - something like:

copy /b filename lpt1

However, please beware that a number of these documents are large and may require more memory then most printers have. SGML documents are normally used by the printing industry. If you know HTML, you will find that SGML is very similar - in fact HTML is sort of a "child" of SGML. Cheap software to view and print SGML files is amazingly difficult to find. If you know of some - for any platform - please let us know!

!!! Users of Unix and Mac Operating Systems READ THIS !!!

Be aware that the PS, PCL and SGML formats all have EXE extentions which are self extracting DOS PKZIP files. In theory, if your computer has a recent version of PKUNZIP for your operating system, you can unzip these files even though they are DOS executables. Nonetheless, your mileage may vary!

If you can't handle these files, we can only recommend that you use the PDF format which uses the Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be downloaded below or found at the Adobe Homepage in the case of the various flavors of Acrobat for Unix.


Acrobat Reader for Windows
Netscape Plug-in Acrobat Reader for Windows
Acrobat Reader for Macintosh
Netscape Plug-in Acrobat Reader for Macintosh

Prior Year Forms and Pubs

Yep, they're available in PDF format for 1992, 1993 and 1994. To find them, select PDF format and include either 1992, 1993 or 1994 in your search string.

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Comments about this page and very limited tech support for the files can be sent to bbunge@fedworld.gov.