Rebecca Garland
Rebecca Garland
Business and Education Expert

At tax time, you have options for filing your taxes. Your documents arrive in the mail or through email. You assemble the documents into a financial picture that shows where you stand at the end of the year. Then you either send the government the extra taxes you still owe, or the government sends you what you’ve overpaid in the form of a refund.

TurboTax has a long history of helping customers with this process, and it is still one of the most popular tax-time software options. Of course, popularity and longevity are well and good, but they don’t always mean things go perfectly at tax time. The service may be used frequently, but TurboTax customer service complaints also show up frequently in online reviews.

TurboTax Q&A

TurboTax reviews – 2.5K

TurboTax rating* – 1.8 ⭐⭐

Claimed losses – $3M

Successful calls – 8%/31.8K

Resolved issues – 11

To help consumers who have questions to Turbotax.intuit.com, we scoured common answers below.

TurboTax Pros and Cons

According to PissedConsumer.com, 77% of TurboTax reviews are negative. Despite this, consumers find advantages and disadvantages in using this tax filing software. Below we share the most common features that TurboTax users find helpful or not.

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • Online software
  • User friendly
  • Great service usually

Cons

  • Poor customer service
  • Misleading information
  • Additional fees to file
  • Papers get lost
  • Software errors
  • Filing costs

How Does TurboTax Work?

TurboTax by Intuit, Inc. is a software platform to help you file your tax returns. Is TurboTax good? The long history of the company – it was created in 1984 – points to its success and credentials. Over the decades, the platform has changed a bit as it moved online and TurboTax support grew more robust.

At its simplest, the software works this way:

  1. You enter your financial information from tax forms.
  2. The TurboTax calculator determines if you owe taxes or if you’ll get a refund.
  3. You log in with your TurboTax login and enter your data.
  4. The software tabulates the right numbers and fills in the blanks on your tax forms for you.
  5. Then you simply submit your forms through the software to file your taxes online.

Is TurboTax free?

Yes, but only in two cases. The first one is if you have to file a simple tax return using the IRS Form 1040. The service has different categories of software to match the complexities of your tax situation. While there is not a single TurboTax customer service email, there is an online community to help answer your question, complete with tax service experts. If you have difficulty determining the right product, you’re encouraged to call the TurboTax phone number or contact the company in a different way.

The second case when you can use TurboTax for free is if you are a representative of active duty and reserve military personnel.

How Much Does TurboTax Service Cost?

There are different price points for their tax services, which is a topic brought up often in TurboTax complaints. Many feel misled when they find the final price for filing. The TurboTax prices are determined by the complexities of your tax situation. So if you ask, is TurboTax free? Only for the most basic tax returns for filers with income on a W-2 who take the standard deduction.

There are four options for tax filing software ranging from free to $169 before adding on specialty services and state refunds, which had additional costs.

TurboTax prices

Customers can interact with experts through the online community, which has some similarities to a TurboTax customer service email, to learn about the differences in products before they start the tax filing process.

In one of the customer reviews left on PissedConsumer.com (#3389728), the consumer complained about the TurboTax price for filing taxes. The reviewer says he felt that his tax filing should be free through turbotax.intuit.com because the “Fed government has said if you made less than 66000 your taxes to file are free from turbo tax.” The poster claims to be angry that he was made to pay for the premium services and demands a refund. He does not mention calling the TurboTax customer service number for questions, however.

TurboTax reviews

How Do I Contact TurboTax Customer Service?

Confidence in a company comes from accessibility when things go wrong. How do I contact TurboTax if there is a problem? TurboTax, an Intuit, Inc company, seems to understand this and has made TurboTax customer service easily accessible across multiple platforms.

Contact TurboTax by phone

In their FAQs, the company is very clear about how to call TurboTax. You can contact the company by calling the TurboTax customer service number at (800) 446-8848.

TurboTax customer service phone number

Contact TurboTax through community center experts

You can also send a message to TurboTax support through the company’s community center. While it is much more public than a TurboTax customer service email, Intuit, Inc. has many specialists on the community center page that can answer questions or direct you to specific pages of information when you have questions. The various threads on the community center page field numerous TurboTax complaints and offer public answers that might help others.

Intuit TurboTax community

Contact TurboTax over social media

Finally, you can contact the company through social media channels. Customers leave feedback and TurboTax reviews on their social media feeds. This includes access to TurboTax customer service through Facebook Messenger (@TurboTax). You can find the company online through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

TurboTax Reviews: Is It Good?

Concerns about the TurboTax prices aren’t the only issues that pop up. TurboTax complaints appear online about many aspects of the tax software. Some of the most common concerns to show up in TurboTax reviews deal with missing refunds, concerns about overcharging by the company, and calculation errors.

In this TurboTax review (#1525121), one customer explains that she filed her taxes easily using www.turbotax.intuit.com. A month later she “received an email from TurboTax admitting a calculation error on their part.” The consumer was encouraged to resubmit her taxes, and when she did, she discovered “I then owed $711 that I no longer had since it had been 1 month since the state paid me.

A long, frustrating conversation with TurboTax support began then, as she felt the company was at fault for the two-month delay in the notification about the error. In her video review, the reviewer explained that after many calls to the TurboTax phone number to speak to different levels of customer support, the situation was finally resolved. She reports that the company “investigated my claim and could not confirm that I was notified in a timely manner,” so they issued her a check for the amount she owed the state, and the matter was sorted. 

So, is TurboTax good? There is always a risk when you turn your financial information over to a software program. You are trusting the company’s calculators to do the math correctly on your behalf, and signing the federal or state forms that it is done correctly. TurboTax customer service has a long, successful history with filing federal and state tax forms on behalf of customers, but as the reviews show – it doesn’t work perfectly every time.

How Long Does It Take to Do Taxes on TurboTax?

Is TurboTax good? For most customers, it seems to work well. Is TurboTax free? For customers who have a very simple tax return, there is no cost. For customers with a simple return, filing taxes through www.turbotax.intuit.com can be done in minutes. Longer, more complex tax returns take a bit longer.

The process of using the service is straightforward, even with complex returns. You assemble your tax documents and financials. You follow the steps in the software to figure out what you need to enter and then you fill in the blanks with the right numbers. Some issues that pop up in TurboTax reviews deal primarily with the time required to find the right documents and ensure that the numbers are correct.

You are encouraged throughout the filing process to call TurboTax with questions or to connect with experts online. The TurboTax customer service number is prominent throughout the filing process, and you are offered choices frequently to have experts review your return and confirm your entries. The more times you interact with the online help options or call a TurboTax phone number, the longer your return will take to be completed.

If you have your forms in hand and you enter the numbers from those forms online without choosing to contact TurboTax for a review, you can be done with the whole filing process in less than ten minutes. If you opt for personalized reviews or need time to assemble documents, you can count on the process taking much longer.

When you’re dealing with both the government and your money, you want to feel secure in your calculations and processes. If you’ve wondered: Is TurboTax safe? You’re not alone in your concern. Millions of customers use the software every year and most of those seem satisfied with the results.

To learn more about the company, visit www.turbotax.intuit.com or seek answers in the TurboTax Q&A. If you'd like to share your experience with the TurboTax service, please leave a review on PissedConsumer.com.

*Disclaimer: Ranking and statistics are based on our users’ review texts and PissedConsumer posters’ reviews. Also, a company’s rating is calculated using a mathematical algorithm that evaluates the information in the profile, including users’ rating, the number of resolved issues, the number of company’s responses, etc. The algorithm is subject to change in the future.

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1. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this publication, it is not intended to provide any legal, medical, accounting, investment or any other professional advice as individual cases may vary and should be discussed with a corresponding expert and/or an attorney.

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