Turbotax File Extension Name: What Is The File Extension For TurboTax?

TurboTax data files normally have the file extension . TAX (followed by the year), and they are typically stored in one of the following locations. Windows XP.

By default, TurboTax saves tax files in the My Documents TurboTax folder. After locating the tax file in its folder, open your tax return using the same version of TurboTax for that year.

For a while, TurboTax used the .tax extension for its data, but eventually switched to a year-specific extension like .tax2012.

Each year’s program will only directly open that year’s data, though they can import data from past years’ returns where this is useful for carrying things over.

To this end, the program will generally recognize the last few years’ formats for TurboTax, and even competing programs such as that of H&R Block.

The format appears to be a proprietary binary format, with the first four bytes spelling TTFN in ASCII (54 54 46 4E in hexadecimal), apparently the “signature bytes” indicating that a file is of a TurboTax format.

Lately they are heavily promoting an online version of TurboTax which you complete through their secure website.

There, the calculations are done “in the cloud”, and your data is stored there, but at the end of the process you get a chance to download your return.

The main downloads are in PDF form, showing the various tax forms and worksheets, but there is also a feature to download a file with a .tax extension that apparently contains the return in a format that can be imported back into TurboTax.

This seems to be encoded binary data of some sort. One file of this sort has PD94 in ASCII as its opening four bytes, but without further examples it is not possible to tell if this is true of all such files.

The 2014 version still says that it’s saving a “.tax file”, but the actual file produced has a .tax2014 extension and starts with TTFN like the desktop-version files.

Any individual tax filers, regardless of income, can electronically request an automatic tax-filing extension. To get the extension however, you must estimate your tax liability on the Free File form, and should also pay any amount due.