Most financial advice treats a tax refund as a bonus — a nice surprise to park in savings or spend on something you’ve been putting off. But for millions of working parents, that refund is a budget line. It is already spent before the return is even filed. The people who need it most are the ones who can least afford to wait for it.
When I sat down with Samantha Reeves in a coffee shop near Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in early March 2026, she had just gotten off a twelve-hour overnight shift. Her scrubs were still on. She ordered a black coffee and pulled out her phone to show me the IRS Where’s My Refund tool — still showing “Return Received” after six weeks. She laughed, but not the kind that means something is funny.
One Refund, Two Months of Rent
Samantha is 31 years old and has worked as a registered nurse at a community hospital in Denver for the past four years. She earns a salary that looks decent on paper, but Denver’s cost of living has a way of erasing that. Daycare for her five-year-old daughter, Maya, runs $1,400 per month — nearly equal to her rent. Her nursing school student loan balance sits at $38,000. Her ex-partner has been out of the picture for two years.
She filed her 2025 federal return on February 6th, 2026, using tax preparation software. Her expected refund: $4,107. That figure included the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which provides up to $2,000 per qualifying child, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), for which she qualified as a single filer with one dependent. She also claimed the Child and Dependent Care Credit for a portion of Maya’s daycare costs.
She had already mentally allocated the refund: $1,400 to cover May daycare without touching her regular paycheck, $800 toward the minimum on her student loan, and the rest into a small emergency fund she had been trying to build for three years. “I had a spreadsheet,” she told me. “I know that sounds like I had it together. I had it together on paper.”
What ‘Processing’ Actually Means When You’re Waiting on Bills
The IRS standard for e-filed returns with direct deposit is 21 days or less for most refunds, according to IRS guidance. Returns claiming the EITC or Additional Child Tax Credit are subject to a mandatory hold under the PATH Act — the IRS cannot legally issue those refunds before mid-February, regardless of when the return was filed. Samantha knew this. She had done her research.
What she didn’t know was what happens after mid-February when the refund still doesn’t move. By week four, Where’s My Refund still showed “Return Received.” By week six, it still had not updated to “Refund Approved.” She called the IRS helpline twice. Both times she was told her return was “in process” and to allow additional time.
As Samantha explained, the generic hold message gave her no information about whether her return had been flagged for identity verification, selected for review, or simply caught in a backlog. The IRS does not specify the reason for most delays through the Where’s My Refund portal. A return can be held for manual review if certain credits exceed income thresholds, if information doesn’t match third-party records, or if the account was flagged in a prior year.
The Weeks She Stopped Checking
Around week seven, Samantha told me she stopped refreshing the portal. “I checked it every morning for a month and a half. I’d wake up before Maya did and just sit there on my phone like it was going to say something different.” At some point, she said, she had to stop because the daily disappointment was affecting her concentration at work — and in her profession, that is not an abstract concern.
She picked up two additional overtime shifts in March to cover the gap. That pushed her weekly hours to roughly 60, which she said she can sustain for a few weeks before the fatigue becomes dangerous. She also borrowed $400 from her mother to cover daycare on time in March — something she described with visible discomfort. “I’m 31. I’m a nurse. I shouldn’t need my mom to spot me $400 because the government is sitting on my money.”
What finally broke the wait was an update she saw on a Tuesday morning in mid-March — the status had quietly changed to “Refund Approved” overnight. No notice in the mail. No explanation for the seven-week gap between “Received” and “Approved.” She never received a CP05 notice or any other IRS correspondence. The return, she said, had simply been held and then released.
When the Money Finally Arrived
The $4,107 hit Samantha’s checking account on April 11th — nine weeks and five days after she filed. She told me her first move was to text her mother the $400 back immediately. Her second was to pay May daycare in full before the end of the week. The rest went toward her student loan and the emergency fund, just as her spreadsheet had planned.
The outcome was technically fine. She got the full amount. No offset, no reduction. But the nine weeks had cost her: two overtime shifts she may not have taken otherwise, a loan from her mother that carried its own emotional weight, and a sustained anxiety that she said followed her into work in ways she is still sorting out.
When I asked Samantha what she would do differently next year, she was quiet for a moment. “I’ll probably still count on it,” she said. “Because what’s the alternative? Not count on money that’s owed to me? I’ll just try not to have anything critical scheduled for March.” That answer, I thought, said more about the practical reality of filing taxes as a sole provider than any advisory checklist could.
The refund was never a windfall for Samantha Reeves. It was the difference between a month that worked and one that didn’t. The IRS eventually processed it correctly — but correctly and on time are two different standards, and for people on the margins of their own budgets, only one of them actually matters.
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