IRS EIN Hours: Is the Online Application or the Phone Line Open Now?

Every IRS EIN route and its hours

Checked against IRS.gov on November 1, 2026.

The online hours in your time zone

The IRS publishes the online hours in Eastern time only. Most of the country moves its clocks on the same days as the East Coast, so these conversions hold all year:

Arizona and Hawaii do not change their clocks, so their hours move against everyone else twice a year. Arizona matches the Mountain row from early November to mid March and the Pacific row the rest of the year. In Hawaii the weekday window runs 1 a.m. to 8 p.m. from early November to mid March and midnight to 7 p.m. the rest of the year. The live box above does this arithmetic for wherever you are.

Four things the published hours leave out

• The weekday window runs past midnight. The IRS writes it as 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. “(next day)”, so 12:30 a.m. on a Saturday is still inside Friday’s window. It closes at 1 a.m. Eastern and reopens at 6 a.m.
• Sunday is evening only. Before 6 p.m. Eastern on a Sunday the online application is closed, which is when a lot of weekend attempts fail.
• A session does not wait for you. The IRS says a session expires after 15 minutes of inactivity and you have to start over, and that the application cannot be saved for later. The IRS also limits EINs to one per responsible party per day, by any method, so a second attempt the same day for a different company under the same person is refused.
• Holidays. The IRS does not say whether the online application keeps its hours on federal holidays. It does say its offices are closed on federal holidays, and the live box shows both phone lines closed on those days.

The phone lines: local time, and the quieter days

The Business and Specialty Tax Line runs on the caller’s own clock: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time, Monday to Friday. The IRS sets Pacific time for callers in Alaska and Hawaii, and its telephone page gives Puerto Rico 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time. This is the line for an existing EIN, a 147C letter or the status of a paper application. It does not issue new EINs to US applicants; which line to call and what each one will do is in the phone guide.

The IRS’s own figures for waiting: about 8 minutes on average from January to April and about 15 minutes from May to December. It says waits are shorter Wednesday to Friday and longer on Mondays and Tuesdays, over the Presidents Day weekend and around the April filing deadline.

The international line, 267-941-1099, is the only way to get an EIN by phone, and only for applicants with no legal residence, principal place of business or principal office in the United States or its territories. It runs 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern, which is late morning to early the next morning in Europe, so the live box shows the time it opens on your clock.

When everything is closed

The fax line is the one route with no hours. The IRS takes faxed SS-4s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and works them on business days; the guide to applying by fax covers the numbers, what to send and what comes back. If the online application is open but turns you away with a three-digit number, look it up in the reference number tool before trying again, because some of those numbers mean stop.