We Filed the Same Return Through Four "Best" Tax Apps. The Refunds Differed by $612.

We ran an experiment we probably should have run years ago. One volunteer, one genuinely ordinary tax situation — a W-2, some freelance income, student-loan interest, a home office — entered identically into the four most-recommended tax apps.

The refunds came back $612 apart.

The same person, the same numbers, the same law. The gap came down to how aggressively each product interviewed the user. The two that landed higher refunds asked better questions: they probed the home office properly, caught a deduction the volunteer didn’t know applied, and flagged a credit the others silently skipped.

The cheapest app wasn’t the worst, and the most expensive wasn’t the best. Price tracked the upsells, not the accuracy. One mid-priced option quietly outperformed a household name that spent the whole flow trying to move us up a tier.

What this changed in our scoring: we now weight “quality of the interview” — does the software find money a normal person would miss? — above interface polish and well above brand. A pretty flow that doesn’t ask about your home office is a pretty flow that costs you $612.

Obvious caveat: one return is an anecdote, not a study, and your situation differs. But it was enough to make us re-test the whole category on harder cases. If you’ve filed the same return two ways and seen a gap, we’d love your numbers.