IRS Notice · CP92 · State Refund Levy · Panic

CP92: your state refund is gone, and a right just opened

A CP92 says the IRS has levied your state tax refund — and gives you the right to a hearing it did not have to give you beforehand. Here's what that's worth.

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A CP92 tells you a levy has already happened. It also carries the strongest right in the collection process, and almost nobody who receives one realizes that.

This letter reads like a receipt, and that is why it gets filed away. The money has gone; there is nothing to stop; the tone is administrative. But read the heading on it, not the body: Seizure of your state tax refund and notice of your right to a hearing. The IRS is telling you two things, and the second one has not happened yet. A hearing right just opened: 30 days from the date printed on this notice, requested on Form 12153. Letting that date pass is the most common quiet mistake in the whole sequence — because a letter about something already finished does not look like a letter with a clock on it.

(800) 236-3741, or (502) 658-6328 locally — answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. After hours you reach our AI receptionist, not voicemail — it answers the common questions, takes your details, and books you the first available thirty minutes. During office hours you reach the office directly, in Georgetown.

The first call is free. Thirty minutes. No obligation, no conditions, no strings. Book a time →, or call the numbers above.

In thirty minutes you will know what else is live on the account behind this levy, whether the hearing is worth requesting, and which of the next steps in the sequence is actually closest.

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.

Key takeaways

•A CP92 reports that the IRS has levied your state tax refund and informs you of your right to a Collection Due Process hearing.
•This is the one levy the law lets the IRS make without offering a hearing first — section 6330(f) of the tax code carves out a levy on a state refund specifically.
•The carve-out delays the hearing; it does not remove it. The same provision entitles you to one after the levy, and this notice is how you get it.
•The request is on Form 12153, within 30 days from the date printed on the notice. Your letter prints the date.
•A hearing is unlikely to bring the refund back. What it is genuinely for is everything the IRS has not taken yet.

What a CP92 is

A CP92 is notice of a levy that has already been made on your state tax refund, together with your right to a hearing about it. The IRS's own description: "We levied your state tax refund for unpaid taxes and are informing you of your right to a Collection Due Process hearing."

The Taxpayer Advocate Service lists it under its full title: Notice of Levy on State Refund — Notice of Your Right to a Hearing.

Both halves of that title are the notice. The first half is history. The second half is live.

Why the IRS did not have to warn you

This is the part that feels wrong, and there is an actual answer to it rather than a shrug.

Section 6330(a) of the tax code says no levy may be made until the IRS has notified you in writing of your right to a hearing — and that notice has to go out at least 30 days beforehand. That is the rule the entire Final Notice family exists to satisfy.

Section 6330(f) then lists four situations where that rule does not apply, and the second is "the Secretary has served a levy on a State to collect a Federal tax liability from a State tax refund." The other three are a jeopardy levy, a disqualified employment tax levy, and a federal contractor levy.

So a state tax refund is, deliberately, the one thing in the collection sequence that can go without a warning letter carrying hearing rights. That is why a CP504 — a notice earlier in the sequence, with no hearing rights attached to it — can put your state refund at risk while your wages and bank account still require a Final Notice first.

And here is the sentence that matters most on this page. The same subsection 6330(f) says that in these situations the taxpayer "shall be given the opportunity for the hearing described in this section within a reasonable period of time after the levy." The right was not removed. It was moved to the other side of the levy — and your CP92 is the delivery of it.

Sources: 26 U.S.C. § 6330(a), (f); IRS, "Understanding your CP92 notice"; Taxpayer Advocate Service. Reviewed 27 August 2026.

Your clock

You have 30 days from the date printed on the notice, and you request the hearing on Form 12153.

The regulation says so for this notice in the same breath as it says so for the pre-levy ones: "A taxpayer is entitled to one CDP hearing with respect to the unpaid tax and tax periods covered by the pre-levy or post-levy CDP Notice provided to the taxpayer. The taxpayer must request the CDP hearing within the 30-day period commencing on the day after the date of the CDP Notice." Your notice prints the resulting date on its face.

Counted from the date on the letter, not from the day it reached you. The same regulation says actual receipt is not a prerequisite — a notice properly sent to your last known address starts the clock.

One phrase worth separating out, because it is easy to misread in your favor. Section 6330(f) says that where the pre-levy hearing is excepted, you must be given the opportunity for a hearing "within a reasonable period of time after the levy." That is the IRS's deadline to offer you the hearing. It is not your deadline to ask for one. Yours is the 30 days above.

If you have already passed it, that is not the end of the road and it is covered below.

If you want to know whether the hearing is worth requesting on your account specifically: (800) 236-3741, or Book thirty minutes →.

What a hearing is actually worth here

Be clear-eyed about the refund: a hearing will probably not bring it back, and we would rather say that here than let you find out at the end of a process you had paid for. It examines whether collection action is appropriate going forward and whether a less intrusive alternative would work; it is not built to unwind a levy already satisfied. There are circumstances where money does come back — a levy that should never have issued, a balance that turns out to be wrong — and they are worth identifying. They are not the usual case.

What it is worth is everything not yet taken. The account that produced this levy is still open, the balance is still there, and the next steps in the sequence — a wage levy, a bank levy, a lien — are still ahead. A hearing puts a stop between you and those while somebody in the Independent Office of Appeals looks at whether an alternative would work.

Publication 1660: "Unless one of the exceptions in section 6330(f) applies, for Jeopardy situations, State Income Tax levies, Federal Contractor levies or Disqualified Employment Tax levies, levy action is not permitted for the subject tax and periods during the 30 days after the levy notice and during the timely requested CDP hearing process."

Read the opening clause of that sentence, because it names your levy. A timely request stops the wage levy, the bank levy and the lien. It does not bar the IRS from levying a state tax refund for the same tax and period — the regulation puts that specific levy outside the suspension. So the protection you are buying is real and it is real for everything except the one thing that has already happened to you.

The cost, and it belongs here rather than in the small print. Pub 1660 also says: "If your request for a CDP hearing is timely, the 10-year period the IRS has to collect your taxes will be suspended until the date Appeals' determination becomes final or you withdraw your request for a hearing in writing." The IRS generally has ten years from assessment to collect. Requesting a hearing pauses that clock. For most people that is a good trade. If your balance is old, it is a trade worth making deliberately.

If the date has already passed

An equivalent hearing remains available, and it is a lesser thing in three specific ways.

Publication 1660: the request "must be postmarked on or before the end of the one-year period after the date of the levy notice."

	CDP hearing	Equivalent hearing
Levy action	Not permitted during the 30 days and the hearing, narrow exceptions aside	Not prohibited. Appeals may ask for a hold; nothing obliges it
Suspends the collection period	Yes	No
Can be taken to Tax Court	Yes	No — "You cannot go to court if you disagree with Appeals' decision"

It gets you a conversation with Appeals and, in practice, no protection while you have it. That is worth having and it is not what you would have had.

The 30-Day Levy Response Checklist

What to pull, what to confirm, and what has to happen first — the order we work in here. It asks for a first name and an email address. These sheets carry dated figures, and the list is how a correction reaches you when one of them changes.

If your letter says CP242 instead

Same situation, same rights, same form. The IRS's description of a CP242 is "We garnished your state tax refund to pay your federal taxes," and it states plainly: "You have the right to a Collection Due Process (CDP) hearing if you disagree with this decision." Requested on Form 12153, by the date printed on the notice.

Everything on this page applies to it unchanged. We have not built a separate page for CP242 because it would answer the same question for the same reader, and two pages competing for one query serves nobody.

If more than the refund has gone — a bank account, wages, other assets — that is a CP90C, and it is a different letter with the same architecture. CP90C: the IRS has already levied →

One distinction worth getting right

A refund offset and a refund levy are not the same thing, and only one of them produces a CP92.

An offset runs under the offset provisions and the Treasury Offset Program: a refund is applied to a debt before it ever reaches you. It requires no Final Notice and it carries no Collection Due Process right at all.

A levy on a state refund runs under the levy provisions, is what section 6330(f)(2) is about, and produces the notice you are holding.

Why this matters practically: if you go looking for a hearing right on an offset, there isn't one, and if you assume your CP92 is an offset, you will miss the one you have. The paperwork tells you which you had.

The situations that change this answer

Asking for a payment plan or an offer bars further levy while it is being processed. Section 6331(k): no levy may be made while a request for an installment agreement or an offer in compromise is pending, for 30 days after a rejection, during an appeal of that rejection, or while an agreement is in effect. Given what this page has just said about what the hearing will and will not achieve, this is often the more useful action of the two — and the two are not alternatives. You can do both.

The protection begins, for an offer, "on the date the Secretary accepts such offer for processing" — not the day you send it. And it bars levy, not lien filing, and not interest.

Two limits travel with it, and you have already met the second — a refund offset is precisely what section 6402 covers. Section 6331(k)(3) borrows the exceptions in section 6331(i)(3), so the bar gives way where the IRS finds collection is in jeopardy, and it does not stop a federal refund being taken as an offset under section 6402. And a pending request suspends the ten-year collection period — the price of the protection, and it belongs in the decision.

You may have used your hearing already. Section 6330(b)(2) allows only one CDP hearing per taxable period. If you went through one on this year before, this notice does not give you a second, and the equivalent-hearing route may be all that remains.

You may be able to argue the balance itself, not just the collection. Section 6330(c)(2)(B) allows the underlying liability to be raised at the hearing where you "did not receive any statutory notice of deficiency for such tax liability or did not otherwise have an opportunity to dispute" it. If the year behind this levy is one the IRS assessed without you — a Substitute for Return, or a notice sent to an old address — that changes what the hearing is for, and it is the one situation in which a hearing can genuinely be about the money.

If the balance is old, check how old first. Section 6343 requires the IRS to release a levy where the liability has become "unenforceable by reason of lapse of time." On an old account the ten-year collection period may be the most important fact on it, and requesting a hearing pauses that clock — which is the argument against requesting one, and it only applies here.

After the hearing there is a second deadline. If Appeals decides against you, section 6330(d)(1) gives you 30 days from the determination to petition the United States Tax Court. It runs from a different document than the 30 days on your notice, and it is easy to miss because nobody mentions it until it has passed.

What to do next

File Form 12153 inside the window, today if you can.

It preserves the right; the argument can develop afterwards. Letting this date pass is the most common quiet mistake in the sequence, which is why it goes first. It goes to the address on your notice.

Find the date on the notice and work to it.

Everything else on this list is easier once the hearing question is settled.

Decide about the hearing separately from how you feel about the refund.

They are different questions. The refund is probably gone; the hearing is about the next thing.

Pull the transcripts.

They are free and you can request them yourself. What you want is what else is live on the account: whether a Final Notice has been issued for the other collection routes, whether a lien has been filed, and how old each year's assessment is. Reading them is the harder part, and on this notice it settles the question the letter does not — whether what happened was a levy carrying a hearing right, or an offset carrying none.

Arrive with a collection alternative rather than an objection.

A hearing goes better with something on the table than with a complaint.

Expect the state to have its own view.

See below.

If you want to know what is still ahead on this account rather than what is behind it: (800) 236-3741, or Book thirty minutes →.

What happens if you do nothing

The hearing right lapses, and the sequence carries on without you.

The refund is gone either way — this page has been straight with you about that. What is still ahead is everything not yet taken: a wage levy, a bank levy, a lien. The account that produced this levy is still open and still moving.

The hearing is the one point where you get to put an alternative in front of somebody before that happens. After the 30 days, the equivalent hearing gets you the meeting without the protections — no bar on levy, no suspension, no Tax Court.

Reaching that conclusion knowingly is different from reaching it by letting a date pass, and it is the only version of "do nothing" we would ever recommend.

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

If your Kentucky refund was the one taken, there is a second layer to this and it runs on state law.

Kentucky satisfies its own undisputed delinquent tax liability out of an income tax refund before transmitting any balance to another claimant. KRS 131.560 provides that after satisfaction of any undisputed delinquent tax liability due to the Department of Revenue, the withheld refund balance is transmitted to the claimant agency. So if Kentucky is owed anything, the refund the IRS levied may have been smaller than you expected before the IRS ever reached it.

There is also a cost on the state side with no federal counterpart, and it is the reason a Kentucky balance grows faster than a federal one: a 25% cost-of-collection fee under KRS 131.440.

Read the statute's own scope before relying on either side of it. KRS 131.440(1) opens "For purposes of the program described in KRS 131.400(3)" and imposes the fees "after the expiration of the tax amnesty period" — so the 25% on "all taxes which are or become due and owing to the department" sits inside that scope, and the carve-outs in subsection (3) are anchored to the same period. What is not in doubt is the department's practice: DOR publishes that the fee "may be added to the amount of unpaid tax due 60 days after the Original Notice Date." The 60-day trigger is the department's implementation, not statutory text, and a protest or a payment agreement should not be relied on as a shield — the (3) carve-outs reach an account protested as of the expiration of the amnesty period, or under an agreement negotiated prior to or during it, and how DOR applies them now is not settled on the published sources. The reliable route is the waiver: KRS 131.440(2) gives the commissioner discretion to waive collection fees for reasonable cause.

There is an asymmetry in the statutes worth knowing about, and it is a factual observation rather than a complaint. Where a third-party agency's debt is claimed against your refund, KRS 131.570(1) requires the department to notify you in writing and gives you 30 days from the date of the notice to request a hearing before that claimant agency. Kentucky's own tax liability is satisfied first, and carries no corresponding notice-and-hearing right.

Practically: a Kentucky refund can be reduced by the state before the federal levy ever reaches it, and the two processes have different paperwork and different rights attached. How a Kentucky balance and an IRS balance interact →

Sources: KRS 131.560; KRS 131.570(1); KRS 131.440(1)(a)1 and (3); Kentucky Department of Revenue, Penalties, Interest and Fees. Kentucky Legislative Research Commission. Reviewed 5 September 2026.

What we see

A CP92 is rarely the reason somebody calls. It turns up in the pile once they have come about something else, sitting underneath the letter that actually frightened them, because a notice about money already gone does not look like a notice with a deadline on it. So when we find one, the first thing we do is check the date on its face against today, and then read the rest of the account to see what is still ahead of the person rather than behind them. The misconception people arrive with is that the hearing is about getting the refund back; the honest framing is that it is about everything that has not been taken yet, and that reframing is usually the whole conversation.

Katherine — You are welcome to swap this for what a CP92 actually looks like when it surfaces in one of your files

Katherine is a CPA, which places her in the category of representative the IRS recognizes as having unlimited rights to act for a taxpayer before it — including filing a Power of Attorney and reading the account directly. On a notice like this one, that is the difference between knowing the refund is gone and knowing what else is already in motion.

The reason to do this at all is the account, not the refund

If the balance behind this levy is nearly cleared, there may be nothing left for a hearing to do, and that is a fine reason not to have one. Reaching that conclusion knowingly is different from reaching it by letting a date pass, and it is the only version of "do nothing" we would ever recommend. What decides it is not on your letter — it is how much is still owed, across which years, and how much of the ten-year collection period is left on each.

These are the ones where the hearing is worth having, and any one of them is enough:

A balance remains and the sequence is still running toward a wage levy, a bank levy or a lien.
The year behind this levy is one the IRS assessed without you, which is the one situation where a hearing can be about the money.
No earlier Collection Due Process hearing has been used on this period.
The balance is old enough that the collection-period arithmetic cuts the other way, and you want to know before you pause the clock.

Which of those is you is one question with a definite answer, and it is on the transcript. (800) 236-3741, or Book a time →.

Where this sits in the sequence

Notice	What it is
CP504	The notice that put the refund at risk.
CP92▶ You are here	Your state refund has been levied — and a Collection Due Process hearing right just opened.
LT11	The Final Notice that has to come before a wage or bank levy.

The notice that put the refund at risk: CP504 → The notice that has to come before a wage or bank levy: LT11 — the Final Notice → All notices: The IRS notice index → If a levy reaches the bank next: Bank levy release →

Frequently asked

Why didn't the IRS warn me before taking my state refund?

Because the law does not require it for that particular levy. Section 6330(f)(2) of the tax code excepts a levy served on a State to collect a federal liability from a state refund from the pre-levy hearing requirement. The same provision entitles you to a hearing after the levy instead, which is what your CP92 is offering.

Can I get the refund back?

Usually not through this route. A Collection Due Process hearing is about collection going forward rather than about unwinding a levy already satisfied. Where the underlying balance turns out to be wrong, that is a different and better argument, and it is worth checking the account for.

Is it still worth requesting the hearing?

That depends on what else is on your account. If a balance remains and the sequence is still running, the hearing normally stops further levy action while it is pending, which is the real value. If the balance is now resolved, there may be nothing left for it to do.

Is a CP92 the same as my refund being offset?

No, and the distinction matters. An offset applies a refund to a debt before it reaches you and carries no hearing right. A levy on a state refund is what a CP92 reports, and it does.

What if the date on my notice has passed?

An equivalent hearing is available for a year from the date of the levy notice. It gets you a conversation with Appeals, but levy action is not prohibited during it, the collection period is not suspended, and it cannot be taken to Tax Court.

Does requesting a hearing stop the IRS taking next year's state refund too?

No, and that is the one thing it does not stop. The regulation puts a levy on a state tax refund for the same tax and period outside the suspension a timely request otherwise gives you. It stops the wage levy, the bank levy and the lien.

If you'd rather not work it out alone

We handle IRS collection matters for individuals and small businesses from our office in Georgetown, Kentucky. If a CP92 has arrived, we can work out with you what else is live on the account and whether the hearing is worth requesting.

The first call is free. Thirty minutes. No obligation, no conditions, no strings. You will come away knowing what else is live on the account behind this levy, whether the hearing is worth requesting, and which of the next steps in the sequence is actually closest. You do not need paperwork organized; the notice and a rough sense of the years involved is enough.

Call (800) 236-3741, or (502) 658-6328 locally — or Book a time →. The line is answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so if it is late and you have just opened the envelope you can start tonight. After hours you reach our AI receptionist rather than voicemail — it answers the common questions, takes your details, and books you the first available thirty minutes. Katherine works the account herself.

Call (800) 236-3741 Book a Consult

This article is general information, not tax advice for your situation. Every account is different, the options described here are not available to everyone, and no outcome is guaranteed.

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