Form 2553 Fax Number: Both IRS Numbers and Which One Is Yours

There are two fax numbers for Form 2553 and only one of them is yours. Kansas City is 855-887-7734. Ogden is 855-214-7520. Both are toll-free, both are live, and both will accept your election without complaint — which is the whole problem. A form faxed to the wrong service center does not bounce. It goes quiet.

Which number applies is decided by a single fact: the state where the corporation's principal business, office or agency is located. That means where the business actually operates. It is not the state of incorporation, not the registered agent's address, and not where your accountant sits. A Delaware LLC run out of San Diego is a California filing and goes to Ogden.

Use the lookup rather than the summary. It reads from the same verified state list Scorply uses to build the form itself, and it gives you the mailing address alongside the fax number. You can also look up the IRS mailing address and fax number for your state on its own page.

Why there are two numbers

There is no single national fax line for Form 2553. The form is worked at two IRS submission processing campuses, and each has its own line. The number you dial is not a preference or a load-balancing choice — it identifies the campus that will process your election and issue the CP261 acceptance notice.

The split covers 51 jurisdictions exactly: 24 to Kansas City, 27 to Ogden, with no overlaps and no state served by both. There is no case where either number is acceptable, and no fallback number for a state you cannot find.

These are fax lines. Do not call them.

Both numbers are unattended. Dialing 855-887-7734 or 855-214-7520 from a telephone gets you a fax handshake and nothing else — nobody at the IRS answers them, and there is no option to confirm receipt by voice.

If you need to speak to a person about an election — to chase a missing acceptance notice, or to ask where to file from outside the United States — the number is the IRS Business and Specialty Tax Line on 800-829-4933.

Check the number is current before you dial

The two numbers above were checked against the IRS where-to-file page for Form 2553 and the Instructions for Form 2553 (Rev. December 2020) on July 30, 2026. IRS fax numbers do change, and superseded ones stay indexed on blog posts and forum threads for years afterwards.

How to fax it

1. 1Print and sign in ink

   The Signature and Date boxes on page 1 are not fillable fields in the IRS Form 2553 PDF — only Title is — so both go on by hand, as does every shareholder consent in Column K. Use black ink; fax reduces everything to one bit per pixel and pale blue can vanish. Print at 100% with no fit-to-page scaling.

2. 2Assemble the entire submission

   The form is four pages as issued. Send every page you completed, plus additional copies of page 2 if you have more than seven shareholders, plus any attachment — a late-relief statement, for example. Nothing should be stapled or annotated beyond what the form calls for.

3. 3Dial the number for where you operate

   Kansas City on 855-887-7734, Ogden on 855-214-7520. Confirm the routing against the state where the business has its principal office, not where it was formed.

4. 4Send it in one transmission

   If a send fails partway through, resend the whole document rather than only the missing pages. Two partial faxes arriving separately are two incomplete submissions, not one complete one.

5. 5Keep the transmission report

   It should show the number dialed, the page count, the date and time, and a successful result. That report is the only thing that establishes your filing date. If you used an online fax service, download the PDF confirmation — do not rely on the email sitting in your inbox.

How to confirm you used the right number

• Read the number off the transmission report, not off your memory of what you typed. Compare it digit by digit against your center.
• Check you routed on operations, not formation. This is the single most common misrouting error, and Delaware-formed businesses run from somewhere else are the highest-risk group.
• If the principal office moved, route on where the business operates now, not where it was when you formed it.
• Match the page count on the report against what you fed in, including attachments. A count that is short by a page means something did not go through.
• Treat anything other than a successful result as not filed. A busy signal, a partial send or an error code is not a filing, whatever the deadline says.

What happens if you fax the wrong service center

Visibly, nothing. Both numbers are legitimate IRS fax lines, so the transmission completes and your report says it succeeded. The IRS does not publish what becomes of a Form 2553 that arrives at a campus that does not serve your state. Campuses do move work between themselves, but nothing guarantees it, nothing schedules it, and nothing tells you it has happened.

The symptom is an absence — the CP261 that never turns up. That is a slow signal, which is why it is worth checking the routing before you dial rather than after.

The fix is straightforward. Refax to the correct number as soon as you notice, sending exactly the same document: do not re-date it, do not re-sign it, do not tidy it up. Keep both transmission reports. If your deadline fell between the two attempts, the earlier report is the evidence you would be relying on, and it only helps you if the document behind it is unchanged.

If the corrected fax lands after your deadline, being late is not fatal on its own. Under IRC §1362(b)(3) a late election is not void — it is simply treated as an election for the following tax year unless you request relief. To keep the original date you file under Rev. Proc. 2013-30, which stays open for 3 years and 75 days after the effective date on line E. The conditions and the required top-margin wording are in the late election guide.

Fax or mail?

Both are accepted and neither is preferred by the IRS. Fax gives you a timestamped report the same day, which is why it is the better choice against a deadline and why it costs nothing to resend if you doubt the first attempt. Certified mail gives you a postmark and a return receipt, and suits a submission too thick to push through a fax reliably — a long shareholder list running to several copies of page 2, or a substantial late-relief statement. The addresses, the private delivery service street addresses, and the trade-offs in full are on where to send Form 2553, and the mailing route step by step is on where to mail Form 2553.

Do not do both. One submission, one channel, one set of evidence.

If your business operates outside the 50 states and DC

There is no published answer. The IRS where-to-file page for Form 2553 has exactly two rows and the instructions carry the same two, neither of which covers an entity whose principal business, office or agency sits outside the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Forms 1120-S and SS-4 publish a foreign row; Form 2553 does not.

Practitioners commonly default to Ogden, but no IRS page says so for this form, so treat that as folklore rather than instruction. Call 800-829-4933 and get the answer for your facts before you send anything.

The one case where nothing gets faxed

Form 2553 cannot be e-filed. There is no portal, no Business Tax Account submission path, and no tax software that transmits it. The single electronic route is narrow and only exists for late elections: attaching the election to a timely e-filed Form 1120-S as a PDF named exactly Form2553.pdf. That is an attachment to a return, not e-filing the election. A timely election has no electronic path at all — see why there is no e-file option.

After the fax goes through

The acceptance notice is CP261, and the IRS says to expect a determination in about 60 days. It does not publish a live processing estimate for Form 2553, so treat that as a stated expectation rather than a promise — see Form 2553 processing time for what happens after you file. Keep your transmission report somewhere permanent — you will want it for opening payroll accounts and for any later dispute about when you filed.

If nothing has arrived after 60 days, call 800-829-4933 with the report in front of you. Refaxing to the same, correct number out of impatience just creates a duplicate in the same queue. Resend only when you have a reason to believe the original did not land — a failed transmission, or a number you now know was wrong. The rest of what happens after filing is covered in the full instructions.