IRS Notice · Form 668-A · Bank Levy

Form 668-A: your bank account is frozen, and you have 21 days

A Form 668-A bank levy takes a snapshot: whatever was in the account the moment your bank received it. The bank holds those funds for 21 days before sending them, and that is the window.

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A Form 668-A bank levy takes a snapshot: whatever was in the account the moment your bank received it. The bank holds those funds for 21 days before sending them, and that is the window.

Two things, right now, before anything else. The levy caught what was in the account at the moment the bank received it — and normally not what you deposit afterwards. The IRS: "Normally, the levy does not affect funds you add to your bank account after the date of the levy." So keep using the account. People stop depositing anywhere, which makes the next few weeks far worse than they need to be.

The bank holds the money for 21 days before it goes. That is not a deadline you can miss; it is the window in which the money is still recoverable without a refund claim. It runs from your bank's receipt of the levy, and the bank knows that date.

Call (800) 236-3741, or (502) 658-6328 locally — answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 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. During office hours you reach the office directly, in Georgetown. Book a time →

The first call is free. Thirty minutes. No obligation, no conditions, no strings — and the first question will be what time your bank took delivery.

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. On a 21-day clock that is the difference between a file being read today and a file being queued.

Key takeaways

•Form 668-A is a Notice of Levy served on a third party holding your money — most often a bank.
•It is a one-time snapshot, not a continuing claim. It reaches the balance at the moment of receipt. Later deposits are normally not caught by that levy — the IRS's own word is "normally".
•21 days. The Internal Revenue Code gives a 21-day waiting period before the bank complies, running from the bank's receipt.
•A bank levy has no exempt amount. This is the difference from a wage levy, and readers carry the wage logic across constantly.
•The IRS must release a levy in the five circumstances listed in section 6343(a)(1) — including where release will facilitate collection, and where the levy creates an economic hardship. A levy that was premature or did not follow procedure is a separate and later remedy: section 6343(d) lets the IRS return money already taken, and that one is discretionary.
•On hardship, wages and bank accounts are treated differently: on wages the IRS must release; on a bank levy it may.

What a Form 668-A is

Form 668-A is the notice the IRS serves on somebody who is holding money that belongs to you, requiring them to turn it over.

Most people meet it as a bank levy, and that is how this page is written. It is not limited to banks — it can be served on anyone holding a fixed and determinable obligation to you, which in practice includes clients who owe you money, brokerages and receivables.

The document you are holding is probably not the 668-A itself. The IRS serves the levy on the bank; the copy that reaches you tells you what has happened. The bank's copy is the operative one, and the bank's receipt date is what the 21 days run from.

Its sibling, and the contrast that explains both: Form 668-W is the wage levy. A 668-W is continuous — it attaches to each paycheck until released or the balance is paid. A 668-A is a single snapshot. They are opposite mechanisms and the reader who has one usually assumes it behaves like the other.

And to keep the larger frame straight, in the IRS's own two clauses: "A lien secures the government's interest in your property when you don't pay your tax debt. A levy actually takes the property to pay the tax debt." If a lien is what you have, that is Letter 3172, and nothing has been taken.

Your clock

Twenty-one days, from the day your bank received the levy.

The Internal Revenue Code provides a 21-day waiting period before the bank complies. The IRS's own description of the purpose is unusually plain: the period exists so a taxpayer can contact the IRS, arrange payment, or report an error in the levy.

Three details about that window that decide what you can do:

It runs from the bank's receipt, not from the date on your copy and not from the day you noticed. Your bank has that date and will tell you. Ask for it in the first phone call you make.

The freeze is set at a moment, not a day. The IRS: "funds in the account are frozen as of the date and time the levy is received." The words and time are deliberate. If money moved in or out on the same day, the hour decides — and that is a question your bank can answer and we cannot.

Money added afterwards is normally not caught. The IRS's sentence, whole: "Normally, the levy does not affect funds you add to your bank account after the date of the levy." Your next paycheck, deposited the following week, is normally yours. The single most common self-inflicted harm on this page is people going without a bank account for a month because they assumed otherwise — and we are carrying the IRS's own "normally" rather than dropping it, because a second levy is a separate act and this one's reach is not the only thing that can happen to the account.

Sources: IRS, "Information about bank levies"; 26 U.S.C. §6332 at (c). Reviewed 5 September 2026.

What triggered it

A bank levy is issued after the notice sequence has run and the account has passed through the Final Notice stage.

Before the IRS can levy, it must generally have sent a Final Notice of Intent to Levy and Notice of Your Right to a Hearing — an LT11, Letter 1058, CP90 or CP297 — and waited out the 30 days. If you got one of those and did not respond, this is where that sequence ends up.

If you never received one, that is worth establishing rather than assuming. The notice is valid if sent to your last known address, and actual receipt is not required — so "I never got it" is not by itself an answer. But an address the IRS has wrong, a period the notice did not cover, or a levy issued while a hearing request was pending are all different situations, and the first two are on your transcript.

A small number of levies are issued without a pre-levy hearing, lawfully. Jeopardy situations, state tax refund levies, a levy to collect from a federal contractor, and disqualified employment tax levies are the named exceptions. In those cases the hearing right opens afterwards, and the notice that carries it is a CP90C or a CP92.

What happens if you do nothing

From day 22, the bank can send the money. Section 6332(c) fixes the earliest date it may comply, not the date it will — but plan on the earliest.

After that, getting it back is a materially different problem. It is not impossible — a wrongful levy claim and a refund route both exist — but they are slower, narrower, and they are asking for a return rather than preventing a transfer. The 21 days are the cheap window and the difference between the two is large.

The levy itself does not repeat. That particular 668-A caught what it caught. But a levy can be issued again, and on an unresolved balance it commonly is — which is why the useful goal in the 21 days is usually not just this levy but the status of the account behind it.

If it is tonight and the bank is shut

Everything below starts with a call your bank has to answer, so here is what the hours before that should contain.

Keep depositing. The levy reached the balance at one moment. Normally it does not reach what goes in afterwards, so a paycheck landing on Monday is normally yours. Going unbanked for a month is the harm people do to themselves on this page.

Look at what is scheduled to come out. Automatic payments, direct debits, card payments and checks written against the frozen balance will fail, and each failure can add a fee of its own. The levy is one problem; two weeks of failed payments on top of it is a second one, and this is the part you can act on tonight. Move what you can to another account, cancel what you can, and warn whoever is about to be paid.

Do not assume rent is gone. Money added after the levy is normally outside it. If your rent money is already in the frozen balance, the 21 days are the window in which it is still recoverable — which is what the rest of this page is about.

Find your copy of the levy. The phone number you need in the morning is printed on it.

And you do not have to wait for morning to start. Our line is answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week: (800) 236-3741, or Book a time → and the slot is waiting when the banks open.

What to do in the next 21 days

1. Call the bank and get the exact date and time it received the levy. Everything on this page is measured from that. Do this before you call anyone else — and if it is the middle of the night, it is the first call of the morning rather than a reason to wait.

2. Call the number on your copy of the levy. The IRS's own instruction is to call the number shown on the Form 668-A. This is the fastest route to the only person who can release it.

3. Work out what you are asking for. There are two different requests and they get confused: release this levy and fix the underlying account so there are no more. You usually want both, but the first has 21 days on it and the second does not.

4. If the levy has created a genuine hardship, say so specifically. "This is a hardship" is not an argument. "This account holds the money for October rent and my employer pays into it on the 3rd" is. Section 6343(a)(1)(D) is about the levy creating an economic hardship — an inability to meet reasonable basic living expenses.

5. Check whether any of the mandatory release grounds apply to you. Section 6343(a)(1) requires the IRS to release a levy where:

Ground	In plain terms
The liability is satisfied or becomes unenforceable	It is paid, or the collection period has run
Release will facilitate collection	Letting go gets the IRS paid faster than holding on
An installment agreement is in effect covering the liability	Unless the agreement says otherwise
The levy creates an economic hardship	Reasonable basic living expenses cannot be met
The fair market value exceeds the liability and partial release will not hinder collection	The levy is disproportionate

A release is not a resolution. In the IRS's own words, releasing a levy does not mean you no longer owe the balance — you still have to make arrangements to resolve the debt, or a levy may be reissued. Getting this money back and settling the account behind it are two separate pieces of work.

6. Ask for an installment agreement or an offer even if you do not expect it to be accepted quickly. Section 6331(k) bars levy while a request for an installment agreement or an offer in compromise is pending, for 30 days after a rejection or a termination, during an appeal filed in those 30 days, and while an agreement is in effect. It does not undo the levy already served, and it is the thing that stops the next one.

"Pending" has a start date the statute defines, and it is not the day you post the form. An offer is pending "beginning on the date the Secretary accepts such offer for processing." The protection begins when the IRS takes the submission in, not when you send it — so the date that matters is theirs. And it is a bar on levy and nothing else: it does not stop a Notice of Federal Tax Lien being filed, and it does not stop interest and penalties accruing.

Two limits travel with that protection and they belong in the same paragraph. Section 6331(k)(3) borrows the exceptions in 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.

7. If a hearing request was timely filed and pending when this levy was served, that is a specific problem, not a general grievance. Levy is prohibited during a timely Collection Due Process request and while the hearing and any appeal are pending. A levy served in that window should not have been.

The 30-Day Levy Response Checklist

Your window here is 21 days rather than 30, and it is the bank's clock rather than yours — but the sequence in the checklist is the same one, one step earlier. It asks for a first name and an email address. The figures on it are dated; the list is how we reach you when one moves.

[ Download the checklist ]

The Kentucky note

If the Kentucky Department of Revenue has levied your bank account, the mechanism is different from the federal one in a way that matters, and it is not a difference of length.

Under KRS 131.672(3) — the statute governing levies arising from the department's financial institution data match — the levy arises at the time the bank receives the notice, and the department provides notice to the taxpayer within two business days after the notice is sent to the bank.

That is a notice sequence, not a holding period, and the two are not comparable quantities. The federal 21 days is a period during which the money sits before it moves. Kentucky's two business days is when you find out. Writing "Kentucky gives you two days where the IRS gives you twenty-one" would be false, and it is the obvious wrong sentence to write here.

One practical detail from the same statute: under KRS 131.672(5), the bank may deduct a fee of not more than twenty dollars from the account before remitting.

And the structural difference, which is the important one. Kentucky's collection statutes provide no hearing right, no appeal right and no suspension of collection triggered by a lien filing or a levy. What Kentucky provides instead sits earlier: the protest under KRS 131.110 — 60 days from the date of the notice, in writing — then a conference, a final ruling, and the Board of Tax Appeals. That protest is doing the work the federal Collection Due Process hearing does, and once it closes there is no second door. How a Kentucky balance and an IRS balance interact →

Sources: KRS 131.672 at (3) and (5); KRS 131.510 at (1); KRS 131.110. The absence of a hearing right is a verified negative across KRS 131.500, 131.510, 131.515, 131.520 and 131.672. Reviewed 5 September 2026.

What we see

The call usually opens with the same sentence: the card was declined and nobody at the bank would explain why. The first thing we ask for is the date and time the bank took delivery of the levy, because every move still available is measured from that moment and the bank is the only party who knows it. After that we look at what the frozen balance was actually holding and why — rent, payroll, money that belongs to somebody else — because a levy is argued in specifics rather than adjectives, and specifics are what somebody at the IRS can act on. On day eighteen the conversation is narrower than on day two, but it is not over, and people talk themselves out of calling because they assume it is.

Katherine — swap this for what you actually see on a bank levy; two true sentences from your own desk beat six good invented ones.

When a bank levy is more complicated than it looks

The general case is above: one personal account, one levy, 21 days. What follows is for accounts that are not that simple. If none of the bold openers below describes you, you have the whole answer already and can stop here.

If it is a joint account. The levy reaches the account, and the IRS's claim is against your interest in it. A co-owner who is not liable for the tax has a route — a wrongful levy claim — and it is a claim to be made rather than a fact that stops the levy automatically. The bank will not sort this out for you and the 21 days do not pause while it is argued.

If it is a business account and the tax is personal, or the reverse. Whose liability, whose account and whose money are three separate questions, and a levy that crosses them is the most common reason a levy is released as improperly issued. It is also the situation where getting the entity structure in front of the right person quickly matters more than the argument does.

If money in the account is not yours. Client funds, a trust account, money held for someone else. The account name is what the IRS acts on; the ownership is what a wrongful levy claim is about. Section 6332(e) discharges the bank from liability when it honors a levy in good faith, so the bank is not in a position to adjudicate this for you — which is not the bank being difficult, it is the statute working as designed.

If the bank did the wrong thing. Section 6332(d) makes a person who refuses to surrender property subject to a levy personally liable for it, with a penalty for refusal without reasonable cause. That cuts the other way too: a bank that turned funds over early, or that took funds deposited after the levy date, has done something outside the levy. The 21 days are statutory, so if funds moved sooner than that, it is something to raise with the bank — with the receipt date in hand.

If the balance is old. The IRS generally has ten years from assessment to collect, and each year carries its own clock — longer where a pending offer, a timely CDP request, an innocent spouse claim or a bankruptcy suspended it, which is why the transcript rather than the arithmetic is the answer. A levy on a balance whose period has expired is not a levy that gets argued about; it is one that has to be released.

If certain categories of property are involved. Section 6334 exempts specific categories from levy — among them certain personal effects, tools of a trade, unemployment benefits, certain annuity and pension payments, workers' compensation, and certain service-connected disability payments. We are not printing the dollar caps. Section 6334(g) adjusts them annually, so any figure taken from the bare statutory text is a base amount rather than a current one. The categories are the useful part; the numbers need a dated source.

And the one that is not on this list. Your principal residence cannot be levied without written approval of a judge or magistrate of a United States district court — section 6334(e)(1). That is a protection on the house, not on the bank account, and it is worth knowing exists because people conflate the two and assume the wrong one applies.

From Katherine

If your card has just been declined and you have landed here, the next hour matters more than the next week. Write down what is scheduled to come out of that account and stop what you can stop — the bounced payments and the fees on top of them are a second problem stacking on the first, and that one is inside your control tonight. Keep depositing; money going in after the levy is normally not what this levy reached, and going unbanked for a month is the harm people do to themselves on this page. Then, first thing in the morning, ask the bank for the date and time it received the levy — that one fact decides what the rest of the week looks like.

Katherine — you are welcome to replace this with what you actually tell someone in that first hour.

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 question we cannot answer and your bank can

The most consequential fact on this page is one we cannot look up for you: the exact date and time your bank received the levy. The 21 days run from it, whether a same-day deposit was caught turns on the hour, and whether the money taken was already committed turns on which side of that moment the transfer fell. We can tell you what the rule is; your bank is the only party who can tell you what happened — and it is an ordinary request the branch can usually answer in one call.

Make that call before you call anyone else. Then it is worth calling us if:

The account is joint, or holds money that is not yours — client funds, a trust account, payroll.
The levy crossed a line between a business account and a personal liability, or the reverse.
The funds moved before day 22, or funds deposited after the levy date went with them.
The levy is causing a hardship you can put numbers to — rent, utilities, the money you get to work on.
The balance is old enough that the collection period may have expired.
A hearing request was timely filed and pending when the levy was served.

A conversation about a bank levy without that timestamp is a conversation about generalities, and you do not have 21 days' worth of generalities to spare. With it, call (800) 236-3741 or Book a time →.

Where this sits in the sequence

Notice	What it is
CP14 → CP501 → CP503	The reminder ladder. No levy authority at any stage.
CP504	Notice of Intent to Levy. State refund reachable; the rate doubles.
LT11 / Letter 1058 / CP90	Final Notice, with the 30-day Collection Due Process hearing right.
Form 668-A▶ You are here	The bank levy itself. A one-time snapshot, with a 21-day hold.
Form 668-W	The wage-levy sibling — continuous, not a snapshot.

Form 668-W (wage levy) →The Final Notice before this →Bank levy release →The IRS notice index →

Frequently asked

How long does a bank hold funds after an IRS levy?

21 days, running from the bank's receipt of the levy. The Internal Revenue Code provides that waiting period so a taxpayer can contact the IRS, arrange payment, or report an error.

Can the IRS take money I deposit after the levy?

Normally not with that levy. The IRS: "Normally, the levy does not affect funds you add to your bank account after the date of the levy." A later levy is a separate act, and the IRS's own hedge is worth keeping.

Is there an exempt amount on a bank levy, like there is on wages?

No. That is the main difference between a Form 668-A and a Form 668-W. A wage levy leaves an exempt portion of each paycheck; a bank levy reaches the balance at the moment of receipt.

Can the IRS levy a joint account if only one of us owes the tax?

The levy reaches the account. A co-owner who is not liable has a wrongful levy claim available, which is something to be raised rather than something that happens automatically.

Will the IRS release the levy if I set up a payment plan?

An installment agreement in effect covering the liability is one of the section 6343 release grounds, unless the agreement provides otherwise. A pending request bars new levies under section 6331(k) but does not by itself lift one already served.

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. In a fair number of cases you can make the call yourself, and the number is printed on your copy of the levy — the IRS's own instruction is to ring it, and it reaches the only people who can release the levy. We would rather tell you that than take the call.

Where an hour of ours is worth having is narrow and specific: whether a release ground applies, and what has to be true about your account for the IRS to let go inside the 21 days.

The first call is free. Thirty minutes. No obligation, no conditions, no strings — just a straight read of whether this levy can be released inside the window. Have the date and time your bank received it if you can; it changes what is worth doing.

Call (800) 236-3741, or (502) 658-6328 locally. The line is answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week — so if it is late and your card has just been declined, 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. Every case here is reviewed and worked by Katherine personally, not a processing department or a case manager. Book a time →

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

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