If your business spent money on research and development between 2022 and 2024, there's a refund window closing on July 6, 2026 — and a lot of companies don't know it exists.
Starting in 2022, a change to Section 174 stopped businesses from deducting R&D costs in the year they spent them. Instead, the expense had to be spread out over five years. Spend $100,000 on qualifying R&D in 2022? Only about $10,000 of it was deductible that year. For a lot of small businesses, that meant paying tax on money they'd already spent.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, undid that for domestic R&D. Two things matter:
That retroactive window is the part with a clock on it. Eligible businesses have until July 6, 2026 to file.
The retroactive relief is aimed at smaller businesses — generally those averaging $31 million or less in annual gross receipts across 2022–2024. Eligibility turns on the specifics of your returns, so this is worth confirming before you count on it.
This is broader than software startups. Qualifying work shows up across industries: improving a manufacturing process, designing and testing prototypes, optimizing production, testing new materials. If your team worked to resolve technical uncertainty, some of that cost likely qualifies.
One honest caveat: amending isn't automatic money, and not every year is worth amending for. The right move is to quantify what you'd actually recover, net of the work involved, and then decide. That's the math we do up front, for free, before you commit to anything.
If you think 2022–2024 might apply to you, the sooner you start the better — pulling documentation for three prior years takes time, and the window won't move.