In FY 2024-25 the Canada Revenue Agency received over 32 million calls. Only 10 million reached an agent, and callers who did get through waited an average of 31 minutes — almost double the prior year. Just 18% of calls met the agency's own 15-minute service standard. This page sets those figures alongside published numbers from the US IRS, UK HMRC, Australian ATO, and NZ IRD — and shows why no clean apples-to-apples ranking is possible without footnoting.
Three views on the same underlying problem: average wait, the share of calls within each agency's own standard, and the strength of the standard itself.
Most recent full fiscal year reported. Wait is queue time from when the caller selects "speak to an agent" to agent pickup; IVR navigation excluded for all agencies.
CRA's 31-minute average wait is roughly 1.7× HMRC, 3.4× ATO, and ~7× the IRS's Filing Season figure. Caveats on the IRS number are large — see methodology.
All figures are for the general/individual taxpayer telephone line where separately reported. Fiscal years differ: CRA and HMRC end 31 March; ATO and IRD end 30 June; IRS ends 30 September. The IRS Filing Season window (Jan–Apr) is staffed materially better than the rest of the year.
| Agency | Country | Reporting period | Average wait | % within standard | Service standard (target) | Denominator caveats |
|---|
Whether ranked by average wait, by the share of calls answered within the stated standard, or by absolute service-level target, the CRA sits at or near the bottom of the four agencies that publish comparable data. The OAG found that for June 2025 only 5% of CRA calls were answered within 15 minutes — against a 65% target.
CRA's service standard was 80% of calls answered within 2 minutes until 2019-20, when it was lowered to 65% within 15 minutes. The IRS and HMRC have held their headline targets at 85%; the ATO's average-wait commitment (under 15 minutes) is similar to CRA's percentile target but has been met in every quarter of FY 2024-25.
The IRS Enterprise LOS excludes 39 of 99 phone lines and only counts calls that ultimately reach an assistor — NTA calls this "materially misleading." The ATO openly blocks inbound calls when capacity is exceeded; blocked calls fall out of the denominator. CRA reports two different ratios from the same underlying data (35%→70% "unique calls answered" in the 100-Day Plan vs 18% within-standard in the OAG audit). Any cross-country chart needs a denominator footnote per cell.
CRA's December 2025 100-Day Service Improvement Plan press release reports "unique calls answered" rising from 35% to 70%+ with peaks of 92%. That is a different denominator — unique callers rather than calls within the 15-minute standard — and it has not yet been reflected in an audited full-year figure. The within-standard share that the OAG measured remains 18% for FY 2024-25.
The IRS's 4-minute Filing Season figure is for the Accounts Management line during the Jan–Apr 2023 filing window only. The TIGTA report titled Telephone Level of Service and Average Wait Times Do Not Fully Reflect the Taxpayer Experience shows wait times on the eight headline lines range widely, with the publicly reported three being the best of the set. A full-year all-line IRS figure would be materially higher than 4 minutes.
HMRC's 18m 38s is a full-year mean across all helplines for FY 2024-25; the Self Assessment peak averaged 36 minutes. ATO's 9m 01s is a full-year mean for FY 2024-25 (ending 30 June 2025); calls blocked at the network edge do not enter the calculation.
For CRA, the OAG reported a 31-minute average wait for FY 2024-25 — almost twice the prior year — and 18% within the 15-minute standard. CRA's December 2025 100-Day Service Improvement Plan press release reports "unique calls answered" rising from 35% to 70%+ with peaks of 92%; this is a different metric on a different denominator and is not yet reflected in an audited full-year figure.