H&R Block alternative that prepares your return for you

H&R Block vs TaxFile: which one fits your return?

These two products solve different problems, and the choice is mostly about whether you want a person available.

Pick H&R Block when you want a professional to look at the return, when your situation involves investments, rental property, an amended return or a prior year, or when sitting across a desk from someone is the thing that gets it done. Those are real advantages and TaxFile does not have them.

Pick TaxFile when your return is W-2 or 1099 income for the current year and the barrier is time rather than complexity. Uploading documents and reviewing a finished return takes an evening, and the deductions come to you instead of waiting behind a question you have to recognize. If you are filing after the deadline, filing taxes late covers what applies once April 15 has passed. TaxFile is self-prepared tax software, not personalized tax advice, and for a genuinely complex return a CPA or an enrolled agent is the right call.

How much does H&R Block cost to do your taxes?

H&R Block sells two things that get quoted as one price, and confusing them is why the searches for what H&R Block charges are so common. The online software is tiered: a free tier for simple returns, then paid tiers that step up as your return gains schedules, with the state return charged separately on the paid tiers. The in-office service is priced differently again, built from the forms your return needs, which means the number is usually known after the appointment rather than before it. H&R Block publishes current-season figures on its own site and they change through the season, so we are not going to quote numbers here that might be out of date when you read this.

What is stable, and what you can plan around, is what moves the total.

The per-schedule and minimum-fee figures come from the 2025 NATP Fee Study of tax professionals, so they describe the storefront market generally rather than one chain. The wider picture, including CPA and enrolled agent averages and whether any of it is deductible, is on the tax preparation fees page, and the tax preparation services page compares every route side by side.

TaxFile prices flat: $39 for a simple federal return, $89 for self-employed, $199 for business, and $19 for each state return. There is no free tier, so if your return is one W-2 and you want to pay nothing, H&R Block's free online tier is the better fit. Where the flat price pays off is the self-employed return, because the number does not move when your second and third 1099 show up.