Registry entry

Application for Automatic Extension of Time To File a U.S. Individual Income Tax Return (Form 4868, 2025 tax year)

Request an automatic extension of time to file the U.S. individual income tax return (Form 1040 series) for the 2025 tax year, using IRS Form 4868. The extension is to FILE, not to PAY: any tax owed is still due by the original deadline, and this form lets the filer estimate that liability and submit a payment. This document describes the 2025 edition; a new edition is published each tax year (see the edition member). It does not submit the request; the live IRS source is always authoritative (see VERIFICATION.md).

You are viewing v1.0.0

The latest published version of this schema is v1.1.0 — see the current reference page. Published versions are immutable; this page stays for agents pinned to us/irs/extension-to-file-4868@1.0.0.

Registry entry

us/irs/extension-to-file-4868

Jurisdiction
United States · national
Version
1.0.0
Verification
draft
Authority
Internal Revenue Service

GovSchema spec v0.2

Authoritative source Form 4868

Machine access

Schema document
registry/us/irs/extension-to-file-4868/2025/1.0.0/schema.jsonapplication/schema+json
Verification record
registry/us/irs/extension-to-file-4868/2025/1.0.0/VERIFICATION.mdtext/markdown
Registry catalog
registry/index.jsonone record per schema id

Field reference

14 fields across 2 steps, read from the published schema.json — names, types, requiredness, and validation as the document states them. The live government form remains the authoritative source.

Your identification

  • taxpayerName string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. The name(s) as they appear on the income tax return. For a joint return, enter both spouses' names.

    length: 1–140
  • addressLine1 string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Your home street address. If you have a P.O. box and no home delivery, enter the box number.

    length: 1–120
  • addressLine2 string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 0–120
  • addressCity string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 1–80
  • addressState string optional

    Two-letter USPS state or territory abbreviation (e.g. CA, NY, TX). Leave blank when entering a foreign address; record the country, province, and postal code in the address lines per the Form 4868 foreign-address instructions.

    pattern
  • addressPostalCode string optional

    U.S. ZIP code in 5-digit or ZIP+4 format (e.g. 90210 or 90210-1234). Leave blank for a foreign address.

    pattern
  • taxpayerSsn string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Your nine-digit U.S. Social Security number, e.g. 123-45-6789.

    pattern
  • spouseSsn string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Required only when filing a joint return: your spouse's nine-digit U.S. Social Security number, e.g. 123-45-6789.

    pattern

Estimate your 2025 tax and payment

  • estimatedTotalTaxLiability number required

    Your best estimate of the total income tax you expect to owe for the 2025 tax year, in U.S. dollars. Enter 0 if you expect to owe no tax; a properly estimated entry is required for the extension to be valid.

  • totalPayments number required

    The total 2025 tax payments you have already made (withholding, estimated payments, and applicable credits), in U.S. dollars. Enter 0 if none.

  • balanceDue number required

    Line 4 minus line 5, in U.S. dollars; if line 5 is more than line 4, enter 0. This is the amount the IRS still expects to be paid by the original filing deadline — the extension does not extend the time to pay.

  • amountPaying number required

    The amount you are paying with this extension request, in U.S. dollars. May be 0; paying the balance due avoids interest and possible penalties.

  • outOfCountry boolean optional

    Check (true) if, on the regular due date of your return, you are out of the country and a U.S. citizen or resident, as defined in the Form 4868 instructions. 'Out of the country' filers may qualify for additional time.

  • form1040nrNoWages boolean optional

    Check (true) if you file Form 1040-NR and did not receive wages as an employee subject to U.S. income tax withholding, per the Form 4868 instructions (this affects the applicable due date).

Verification record

This file is the source-review record for this document edition/version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

This is the first GovSchema document to exercise the edition / tax-year axis introduced in spec v0.2 §5.7 under GSP-0005. See Edition axis below.

Current claim

  • status: draft
  • verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
  • verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-06-30

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official source below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (confirming every published field, type, requiredness, and constraint against the live form — manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded. It therefore remains draft, not verified. Consumers SHOULD treat this as an accurate, source-grounded structural reference, not a load-bearing description of the live process.

Source examined

  • Document (id, edition, version): us/irs/extension-to-file-4868 / 2025 / 1.0.0
  • Spec version: GovSchema 0.2.0
  • Authority: U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
  • Primary source URL: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-4868
  • Official form id: Form 4868
  • Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-06-30
  • Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

The "About Form 4868" page was confirmed live at authoring time. It identifies the form as the "Application for Automatic Extension of Time to File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return", links the current 2025 Form 4868 revision, and links "All Form 4868 Revisions" — confirming the form is republished each tax year (the basis for the edition axis below).

Edition axis (time-versioned form)

Form 4868 is time-versioned: the IRS publishes a fresh revision keyed to each tax year. Per spec v0.2 §5.7 this is modelled on the edition axis, not by bumping version or folding the year into id:

``json "edition": { "scheme": "us-tax-year", "label": "2025" } ``

  • The document carries edition.scheme = us-tax-year, edition.label = 2025.
  • It is stored one directory deeper than a non-edition document, at registry/us/irs/extension-to-file-4868/2025/1.0.0/schema.json; the <edition> path segment (2025) equals edition.label (spec §10 rule 6).
  • id (us/irs/extension-to-file-4868) is year-agnostic: it names the process across all tax-year editions. A 2026 edition will be authored at .../extension-to-file-4868/2026/1.0.0/ and coexists with this one. Neither deprecates the other, since in early 2026 an agent may still file a late 2024 return alongside the 2025 return.
  • version (1.0.0) remains the SemVer content contract within the 2025 edition. A correction to this edition's fields ships as a new version under 2025/; a new tax year ships as a new edition.

Both validators were run at authoring time and pass: node tools/validate.mjs <path> (zero-dependency, rules 1 and 6) and node tools/validate-ajv.mjs <path> (full JSON Schema 2020-12 against the v0.2 meta-schema), the latter reporting the document as [v0.2].

What was confirmed against the source

  • Form identity and purpose. The form is the automatic extension of time to file an individual income tax return (the Form 1040 series). Confirmed against the "About Form 4868" page.
  • File-vs-pay distinction. The extension is to file, not to pay: any tax owed is still due by the original deadline. This drives the balanceDue / amountPaying fields and is stated in the document description and those fields' descriptions.
  • Two-part layout. Form 4868's structure is Part I — Identification and Part II — Individual Income Tax. The document mirrors this as two linear steps (identification, individual_income_tax).
    • Part I → taxpayerName, address fields, taxpayerSsn, spouseSsn.
    • Part II → estimatedTotalTaxLiability (line 4), totalPayments (line 5), balanceDue (line 6), amountPaying (line 7), plus the two checkboxes: outOfCountry (line 8, "out of the country" U.S. citizen/resident) and form1040nrNoWages (line 9, Form 1040-NR filer without wages subject to U.S. withholding).

What is NOT yet independently verified

  • The Part II money line items reflect the structure of Form 4868 but were not yet confirmed amount-by-amount, line-number-by-line-number against the live 2025 PDF; the sourceRef annotations are indicative, not authoritative citations.
  • Dollar amounts are free numeric inputs. The IRS does not publish fixed maxima for these lines, so no minimum/maximum is asserted; this is an intentional absence, not an unverified constraint.
  • Constraint patterns (SSN, ZIP, two-letter state) are reasonable encodings, not citations of a published validation rule from the source.
  • The original form models the address as a composite block; v0.2's flat field model represents it as several address* fields (SPEC §6.1). Foreign-address handling is described in addressState / addressPostalCode rather than modelled structurally.
  • Deadlines and any year-specific dollar thresholds are deliberately not encoded as data; the document points consumers to the live source instead.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance this edition to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field comparison, step 3 flow comparison) against the 2025 Form 4868 PDF specifically, confirms the source is authoritative, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version under 2025/ (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt / nextReviewBy. This v1.0.0 record stays as the authoring provenance.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2026-12-30 (6 months): 4868 is a tax-year-sensitive process and the next edition cycle falls within this window. Re-check the source on or before that date, on any source.url change, and when the IRS publishes the next tax-year revision (which is authored as a new edition, not a re-verification of this one).

View the raw record (VERIFICATION.md)

Version history

Independent and non-affiliated

GovSchema is an independent, open-source project. This reference is not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by Internal Revenue Service or any government. The authoritative source is always the live government form and its official instructions.