For most of the last century, the way the federal government paid you was simple and physical. A check arrived in your mailbox with a Treasury seal on it, you took it to a bank or a check casher, and that was that. That system is being retired, and unlike a lot of policy changes, this one has a hard date attached: September 30, 2025.
Most people will never notice, because most people already get paid electronically. The ones who will notice are the ones with the least slack to absorb a delayed payment, which is why the details are worth knowing.
What Executive Order 14247 did
Executive Order 14247, signed March 25, 2025 and titled Modernizing Payments To and From America’s Bank Account, directed the Treasury Department to stop issuing paper checks as of September 30, 2025, to the extent the law allows. It covers money going out (tax refunds, benefits, grants, payments to vendors and contractors) and money coming in (tax balances, fees, penalties).
The reasoning the government gives is partly about fraud and partly about cost. Paper instruments get lost, stolen, altered and delayed at rates electronic payments do not. The Social Security Administration puts it in a number: a paper check is 16 times more likely to be lost, stolen, altered, or returned undeliverable than an electronic payment. Treasury also reports the average cost to print a check has risen to $3.07, roughly 20 times what an automated payment costs.
Worth being precise about one thing: nothing about how you file a tax return changed. You file the same way you always did. What changed is the plumbing that moves the money afterward.
What happens if you file without direct deposit information
This is the part that will actually affect people, and the IRS published a detailed Q&A in January 2026 spelling out the sequence.
Providing your banking information is still voluntary. If you leave it off and no exception applies, your return is accepted and processed normally, but the refund stalls. If you e-file, you may get an alert flagging the missing information right away.
From there, the IRS mails you a letter at your last known address. Then comes a CP53E notice asking you to respond within 30 days, either by supplying banking information or explaining why you cannot. You provide it through your IRS Individual Online Account. The Where’s My Refund? tool will also show messaging about the missing information.
If you never respond and there is nothing else wrong with the return, the refund is eventually released as a paper check after six weeks. So the paper check has not vanished entirely; it has become the slow fallback rather than the default.
One security note buried in that Q&A deserves repeating. The IRS will contact you about missing banking information only by letter through the U.S. mail. It will not call you, text you, or email you asking for account numbers, and IRS employees cannot take direct deposit information over the phone or in person even if you offer it. Any call or text claiming otherwise is a scam, and this transition is going to generate a lot of them.
If you do not have a bank account
The order acknowledges directly that not everyone has access to traditional banking, and refunds for those taxpayers are supposed to move through alternative electronic routes: certain prepaid debit cards and certain mobile apps. The IRS says it has been coordinating with Treasury, the FDIC, the National Credit Union Administration and U.S. Bank to connect people to free or low-cost accounts, and it points taxpayers to two resources: FDIC GetBanked and MyCreditUnion.gov.
If you are in this position, the practical move is opening an account before filing season rather than during it. Low-fee accounts that cannot overdraft are widely available now at both banks and credit unions, and a prepaid card that accepts direct deposit works as a fallback if a traditional account is not an option for you.
Social Security and the last one percent
Benefits followed the same deadline. As of September 30, 2025, federal law and the executive order require federal benefits to be paid electronically, and the Social Security Administration announced it plans to finish moving every remaining beneficiary to electronic payment during 2026.
The number of people affected is smaller than the headlines suggest. Fewer than one percent of beneficiaries were still receiving paper checks when the deadline hit. But one percent of Social Security is still a lot of households, and they skew toward exactly the people for whom a disrupted payment causes the most damage.
There are two routes. Direct deposit into a bank or credit union account, which you can set up through a my Social Security account online or by asking your financial institution to send the information to SSA for you. Or the Direct Express prepaid debit card, a Treasury program built for benefit recipients without bank accounts, where the payment lands on the card each month. Information on that runs through GoDirect.gov.
SSA also says a waiver is available through Treasury for people who genuinely cannot make the switch, naming mental health concerns and living somewhere remote without access to a financial institution as examples.
Paying the government is changing too
The half of this that gets less attention is inbound payments. The order covers money you send to the IRS as well, and the direction of travel is the same, just slower.
For now, mailed checks, money orders and cash are still accepted for tax payments. Over time the IRS says it will reduce reliance on them, with exceptions carved out for hardship and for situations where the law requires paper. Electronic options already include IRS Direct Pay (straight from a bank account, no fee), your IRS Online Account, debit or credit card and digital wallet payments (processing fees apply), and the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System.
EFTPS is itself being wound down for individuals. New individual enrollments stopped October 17, 2025, and individuals already enrolled will be required to move off it later in 2026, toward Direct Pay or an IRS Online Account. Businesses are on a different track and continue using EFTPS for federal tax deposits.
If you prefer to pay in cash, that option survives in an unexpected form. The IRS partners with a service called Vanilla Direct that lets you pay at participating retail stores, and the agency counts that as an electronic payment. Limits and fees apply.
What still comes on paper
A few categories are untouched or unresolved. The government will keep issuing certified payments in limited circumstances and will still cut a paper check when no alternative exists. Refunds issued to the accounts of deceased taxpayers have not changed at all yet, and the IRS says it will issue guidance when that shifts. Hardship exceptions exist across the board, though the specifics are thin and you should expect to make the case in writing.
The one thing to do about it
If you receive anything from the federal government, whether that is an annual refund or a monthly benefit, check that the agency has current, correct account information for you before the next payment cycle. For taxes, that means entering direct deposit details when you file. For Social Security, that means logging into my Social Security and confirming what is on file.
It takes about ten minutes, and the alternative is discovering the problem when a payment you were counting on does not show up.