Newly Available Individual-Level US Tax Data from 1969 to 1994

This paper describes a series of linkable individual-level data from late twentieth-century federal income tax returns. The full Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 1040 files from 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, and 1994 were held at the Census Bureau since being delivered by the IRS after each year’s tax returns were processed. The data were recently prepared for research, and they are now available for request through the Census Bureau’s restricted data research program. We describe the provenance and composition of the files, assess the coverage and quality of the data, and discuss potential uses of the data for research.