IRS Notice · CP515 · Past-Due Return Reminder

CP515: the IRS still has no record of your return

A CP515 is a reminder that the IRS still has no record of a return it was expecting — and the specimen says something about why this particular letter exists that most coverage leaves out. Nothing on it forfeits a right, but one thing on it does expire, and it expires in your direction.

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A CP515 is a reminder that the IRS still has no record of a return it was expecting — and the specimen says something about why this particular letter exists that most coverage leaves out.

Not filing a return is a thing that happened. It is not a thing you are. That distinction is worth putting first on a page like this, because everything below is easier to read once it is out of the way.

And you may not have ignored anything. The notice's own opening explains why it was sent: “We sent you a previous notice informing you of this, but the notice may have been returned as undelivered or could not be mailed by the United States Postal Service (USPS).” A CP515 often goes to someone who moved. If this is the first you have heard of any of it, that is an ordinary way to arrive here.

Nothing on this letter forfeits a right and there is no petition to file. It is a request for a return. It is not an audit, not a bill, and not an enforcement step.

But it does print a date, and it is about your money rather than the IRS's. The notice states that a refund from withholding or estimated tax has to be claimed by filing within a limited period — “You risk losing your refund if you don't file your return” — and that the same limit applies to credits such as the Earned Income Credit. That is the one thing on a CP515 that actually expires, and it expires in your direction.

If you do not know how many years are missing, or whether you even had to file: (800) 236-3741. The line is answered around the clock; after hours our AI receptionist takes your details and books a time instead of leaving you with a recording. The first call is free — no obligation, no conditions, no strings.

Thirty minutes tells you which years the IRS is actually looking for, whether any of them are years you were not required to file at all, and whether a refund is sitting on one of them and is still claimable. The IRS's own record of what it was told you earned is free and you can pull it yourself — it is called a wage and income transcript, we will tell you how to get one before the call, and reading it with you is most of what the thirty minutes is for. It is also the fastest way to find out that a year is smaller than you feared. Book a time →

Key takeaways

•A CP515 is a reminder that the IRS has no record of a past-due return. It sits on the IRS's own published index of notices for past due tax returns.
•It is often sent because an earlier notice came back undelivered. The specimen says so in its second sentence.
•There is no response deadline that forfeits a right — but the notice prints a limit on claiming a refund or a credit, and that one is real.
•“I don't have to file” is one of the routes the notice itself offers, not an argument you have to win. Both the specimen and the IRS's current page provide for it.
•If you do not file, the IRS may file something in your place — the notice's words are “We may determine your tax for you” — and a return the IRS prepares allows nothing you did not claim.

What a CP515 is

A CP515 is a reminder that the IRS still has no record of a tax return it was expecting from you. The IRS puts it in one line on its index of notices for past due tax returns: “This reminder notice tells you we still have no record that you filed your prior tax return or returns.”

The specimen is headed “Message about your [year] Form 1040” and opens: “Our records show that you haven't filed your tax return for the tax year ending December 31, [year].” The identifying number on it is a Social Security number. This is an individual notice.

The second sentence is the one that changes how this letter should be read, and almost nobody quotes it: “We sent you a previous notice informing you of this, but the notice may have been returned as undelivered or could not be mailed by the United States Postal Service (USPS).”

So a CP515 frequently reaches a person who never saw the first letter. A move, a forwarding order that lapsed, a rental address the IRS never had. If you are opening this and thinking you should have known about it sooner — quite possibly there was nothing to know about, because the notice that would have told you never arrived.

It is one of a run of reminders, and the run's length varies. On the IRS's own index the past-due-return notices appear in this order: CP59, CP63, CP259, CP515, CP516, CP518, CP518B, CP2566, CP2566R, CP3219N. Some of those are different situations rather than later steps — a held refund, a business return — so we are not going to tell you that a CP515 is the second letter or the third. What is true is that it is a reminder, that reminders precede letters with real deadlines, and that the ones with real deadlines are further down that list.

Your clock

No right expires on a CP515 and there is no form that has to be filed by a date — with one exception, and the exception is about your money.

The notice puts it this way:

“You risk losing your refund if you don't file your return. If you are due a refund for withholding or estimated taxes, you must file your return to claim it by [date] plus 3 years and any extension of time to file. The same rule applies to a right to claim tax credits such as the Earned Income Credit.”

Three things about that passage, and the third is the one that gets cut.

It is a limit on claiming, not a penalty for lateness. The consequence of missing it is not a fine. It is that a refund you are owed stops being payable to you, and the money stays with the government. Of everything on this letter, this is the only item with a real expiry — and it runs against the reader rather than for the IRS.

It reaches credits as well as refunds. The Earned Income Credit is named on the notice by name. For a household that was owed the credit and never filed, that is frequently the largest number in the whole situation, and it is on the same clock.

And it is time-limited in a way we are not going to compute for you. The IRS's published sample of this notice renders that date through a template that collides with its own instruction text, so the string it prints is not a date anybody should act on. The limit that applies to your year is real; the figure to work from is on your own letter, and if it is not legible there it is worth establishing properly rather than estimating.

Sources: IRS Notice CP515 specimen, read 21 September 2026; IRS, “Notices for past due tax returns” and “Understanding your CP515 notice”, read 21 September 2026.

What the notice asks you to do — and it offers three answers, not one

The notice does not assume you owe a return. It provides for you saying you don't.

The specimen sets out the filing route first: “Complete and sign your return, include a payment for any tax due, and mail it to us using the envelope provided or fax it to [number],” and adds, for anyone reading that sentence with dread, “If you can't pay the amount due, pay as much as you can now, and make payment arrangements that allow you to pay off the rest over time.”

Then, under its own heading for disagreement: “Complete the Response form to explain whether you've already filed a return, or why you think you don't have to file one.”

Three answers, and two of them are not “file the return.”

Your position	The route
The return is genuinely outstanding	File it. Pay what you can; the balance is a separate problem with its own routes.
You already filed it	Say so. Crossed post, a return filed under a different name or number, and an electronically filed return that rejected without anyone noticing are all ordinary.
You were not required to file	Say that. Income below the filing threshold, or income reported to the IRS that was not yours, are both real answers and the notice makes room for them.

One note on the paperwork, because the sources differ and the difference is small but worth knowing. The IRS's current page for this notice names Form 15103, Form 1040 Return Delinquency, for those explanations. The specimen — a 2019 printing — encloses a “Response form” that asks for the same things, under its own heading for disagreement: “Complete the Response form to explain whether you've already filed a return, or why you think you don't have to file one.” They are doing the same job under different names. Use whichever your letter encloses or names; we are not going to walk you through which box to complete on a form we have not opened in front of us.

One route the older printing does not have: the IRS says that where you are sending Form 15103 only to explain why you do not have to file, it can be submitted online, which needs an IRS online account. For the reader whose answer is the third one, that is the shortest path on this page.

What happens if you do nothing

The reminders continue, and then the IRS calculates the year itself. The notice lists the consequences in two bullets and both are worth reading literally:

“We may determine your tax for you. Penalty and interest charges may continue to accrue.”

“If you are owed a refund for the current tax year, or any prior year, it may be delayed because of this unfiled return.”

“We may determine your tax for you” is the sentence that matters, and its consequence is arithmetic rather than drama. When the IRS calculates a year from the income reported to it by employers, banks and brokers, it works from what it was told you received. It does not know about business expenses you never claimed, a filing status that would have suited you better, or deductions and credits you never asked for. The number that comes out is therefore, in most cases, higher than the number a filed return would have produced — sometimes by a great deal, and particularly for anyone self-employed, whose gross receipts are reported to the IRS while their costs are not.

That is why filing the real return remains the answer even years later, and why it is a better answer than negotiating the figure the IRS reached without it.

The second bullet is the quieter one and it catches people: a refund on a different, filed year can be held up by this unfiled one.

Notice	What it adds
CP59	The first notice that a personal return is missing.
▶CP515You are here	A reminder, often sent after an earlier notice came back undelivered.
CP516	A further request for a return still not received.
CP518	The final reminder in the run.
CP2566	The IRS has calculated the tax itself from third-party income records.
CP3219N	Notice of Deficiency after the IRS filed a return for you — this one starts a hard 90-day Tax Court clock.

See the full library → · What we do at this stage: unfiled back tax returns → · How far back you actually have to go: how many years of unfiled returns →

What to do in the next few weeks

Step one is free, takes about fifteen minutes and settles more than anything else you could do first: find out which years the IRS is actually looking for. Not which years you think are missing — which years the IRS has recorded as missing. Those are two different lists, and reconstructing a year the IRS was never asking about is expensive in exactly the way nobody notices until it is done.

Then:

Work out, for each of those years, whether you were required to file at all. The threshold changes by year, by filing status and by age. A year below it is a “you do not have to file” answer rather than a reconstruction job.
Check whether any of those years was owed a refund, because that is the only thing here on a clock, and it runs out.
Get the income the IRS holds for those years before reconstructing anything. It is the same data the IRS would use to calculate the year itself, and starting from it is faster and more accurate than starting from memory.
File the oldest year that still matters, not necessarily the oldest year that exists. How far back filing compliance actually needs to go is a real question with a real answer, and the answer is frequently a shorter list than the one people arrive carrying.
Deal with any balance afterwards, separately. Filing and paying are two problems and collapsing them is what stops people filing at all.

The part that is genuinely hard is step 4, and it is hard for a reason that surprises people. It is not a records problem — it is a judgment about which years to file, in what order, and what filing each one triggers. Filing a year can start a clock, close one, produce a refund, produce a balance, or bring a year the IRS had stopped asking about back into view. The sequence is where the money is, and it is not visible from a stack of notices sorted by date.

Working out which years the IRS wants is the first thing the call does, and it is done from the transcript rather than from memory.

The Non-Filer's First 30 Days

Written for the fortnight after a letter like this one arrives. How to find out what the IRS actually has on you, how to tell which years it is asking about, what to do first when several years are involved, and where the refund limit bites.

It is built for the situation people are really in — several years, incomplete records, and no clear idea which end to start at.

A first name and an email address, and it is a mailing list. We would rather say so than pretend it isn't. You will hear from this office occasionally, and one click stops it.

[ Get the non-filer sheet ]

Or get onto the calendar and bring the notice. (800) 236-3741 books you in at any hour, and the years get worked out on the thirty minutes rather than down the phone line. It costs nothing, and nobody is asked to decide anything on it.

Katherine M. Johnson, CPA, CTRS

Katherine M. Johnson is a licensed CPA with over 30 years of experience and a Certified Tax Resolution Specialist (CTRS). She personally handles every case — representing individuals and businesses before the IRS and state revenue departments nationwide.

Read full bio

The Kentucky note

Kentucky runs its own filing enforcement, on its own schedule, and a federal notice tells you nothing about where the state has got to.

The two systems do not talk to each other in the way people assume. A CP515 is evidence about the IRS's records and nothing else; a Kentucky return for the same year can be outstanding without a single federal letter mentioning it, and the state's collection tools reach further than the IRS's in one specific direction — professional and occupational licenses, and vehicle registration, under KRS 131.1817.

The sequencing point that catches people is the same one that catches them on the collection side. Kentucky's protections sit earlier in its process than the federal ones do in theirs, and by the time a state balance is being collected the door the federal system is still holding open has often already closed on the state side. An unfiled year is an unfiled year in both systems, and dealing with only the one that sent a letter is how one of them quietly gets worse.

How a Kentucky balance and an IRS balance interact →

Sources: KRS 131.1817 (as amended 27 June 2025). Reviewed 21 September 2026.

What we see

People arrive at a CP515 believing they have been avoiding something, and the shape of it is usually less deliberate than that. A run of years goes missing after something happened — a move, an illness, a business that ended badly, a divorce — and then the not-filing becomes its own reason for not filing, because each year makes the pile harder to look at. What gets read first is not the year on the notice; it is what the IRS holds for that year and the ones around it, because that is what the IRS thinks happened, and it tends to be a narrower story than the one people are bracing for. The misconception people arrive with is that every year has to be filed, all the way back, before anything can be resolved. The work is establishing which years actually have to be filed and in what order — and a year someone has been dreading can turn out to be a year with a refund sitting on it, which is not the direction anyone expects the surprise to go.

And here is the structural version of the sentence at the top of this page. The IRS's own process is built around a reminder, a response form and three answers — one of which is “I did not have to file” — which is not the architecture of a system that assumes the worst of you. Exploring what is actually outstanding commits you to nothing, and it does not oblige you to relive whatever the years were about.

Common questions

Am I in trouble?

No. A CP515 is a reminder that a return is missing. It carries no levy, no lien, no penalty assessment and no deadline that forfeits a right. What it does carry is a limit on claiming a refund, and that one runs against you rather than for the IRS.

Why did I get this when I never got the first one?

Because that is frequently why it exists. The notice says an earlier one “may have been returned as undelivered or could not be mailed” by the Postal Service. A move is the ordinary explanation.

What if I didn't have to file that year?

Then say so — that is one of the three answers the notice itself provides for. The IRS's current guidance names Form 15103 for it; the older printing encloses a Response form that asks the same thing. Income below the filing threshold, or income reported to the IRS that was not yours, are both real answers.

What if I'm owed a refund?

Then filing is urgent for your sake rather than the IRS's. A refund from withholding or estimated tax has to be claimed by filing within a limited period, and the same limit applies to credits such as the Earned Income Credit. Once it passes, the money is not recoverable.

What happens if I just don't respond?

The notice says “We may determine your tax for you.” A return the IRS prepares from third-party income records allows nothing you did not claim, so the resulting balance is usually higher than a filed return would have produced — considerably so for anyone self-employed.

How many years back do I have to go?

Fewer than most people assume, and the real answer depends on the account rather than on a rule of thumb. It has a proper answer, and getting it is worth doing before reconstructing a decade of records rather than after.

If you do not know how many years are missing, that is the first thing the call settles, and it settles it from the IRS's own records. (800) 236-3741, or book a time →. The first call is free.

One question decides whether you need anybody

Is it one year, and do you have the paperwork for it? If so, file it and this is over. A single missing year with the income documents to hand is a return preparation job, and free help exists: the IRS's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly programs prepare returns at no cost for people who qualify — check with your local site which prior years they take, because that part is not published consistently.

It stops being one question when any of these is true:

There are several years, and you do not know which of them the IRS is actually asking for.
The records are gone, and the year has to be built from what the IRS holds rather than from what you kept.
There was self-employment or a business in those years. Gross receipts get reported to the IRS and costs do not, so a year the IRS calculates itself is at its most punishing here.
A refund may be sitting on one of them and you need to know whether it is still claimable before doing anything else.
You think you may not have had to file at all — that is a route, and it is worth establishing properly rather than guessed at.
Notices have already gone past the reminder stage on any of those years, into CP2566 or CP3219N territory, where the deadlines are real.

If you cannot tell which of those is you, that is what the thirty minutes is for — and “one year, go and file it” is a perfectly good outcome of it.

The first call is free. Thirty minutes. No obligation, no conditions, no strings. It is a review rather than a pitch: what is actually outstanding, how we would help, and how an engagement would be structured if it came to that. Bring the notice and whatever you have — and if that is nothing but the envelope, that is a normal place to start. If you would rather Katherine looked at something first, send as much or as little as you want to; the call is free either way.

Call (800) 236-3741, answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week — after hours you reach our AI receptionist rather than a recording, and it can take your details and book the first available thirty minutes. Or Book a time →.

Every case here is reviewed and worked by Katherine personally. Not a processing department, and not a case manager relaying messages from someone you never meet.

Call (800) 236-3741 Book a time

This page explains how IRS notices and the rules behind them generally work. It is not tax or legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create a client relationship. Figures are current as of the last-reviewed date above and the rules change.

Next Level Tax Resolution is a private CPA firm in Georgetown, Kentucky. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, the Kentucky Department of Revenue, or any government agency.

The NLTR Office · Reviewed by Katherine M. Johnson, CPA, CTRS