Short answer
The IRS publishes its acceptance agent list as one page per state or country, and each row carries a name, a street address, and a phone number. On 2026-09-22 we collected all 120 of those pages and counted 11,197 rows, 10,625 of them in 53 US jurisdictions. The address is not a mailing preference. The Internal Revenue Manual calls that field the Business Address (Physical Location) and says a post office box is not permitted as part of it, and across all 11,197 rows we found one row matching a post office box pattern. That means an agent who works from home has a home address in the column, and a random sample of 300 California rows came back 27.7 percent residential under the USPS delivery classification. Being on the list at all is a choice: the applicant has to answer Yes to be listed, the field is required and starts blank, and an agent can change the answer at any time.
Key takeaways
- The list is one page per jurisdiction. We collected all 120 pages on 2026-09-22 and found listings on 112 of them, holding 11,197 rows in total: 10,625 across 53 US jurisdictions and 572 across 59 foreign ones.
- Every row carries the same three facts: name, street address, phone number. Two of them tell you who to contact. The address is the only one that tells you what kind of place the work happens in.
- The field behind that column is the Business Address (Physical Location), and the Internal Revenue Manual says a post office box is not permitted as part of it. Our count found one post office box pattern in 11,197 rows. The manual also lists Business Physical Location as the column the public list is built from, so the published address is the location one and not the mailing one.
- A street address does not mean an office. In a random sample of 300 California rows, USPS delivery classification returned Residential for 83 of them, or 27.7 percent. Separately, 58.2 percent of all 11,197 rows carry a street line with no suite, unit, apartment, floor, room, building, level, or number designation.
- Publication is opt-in. The Internal Revenue Manual says an applicant must select Yes to be placed on the public list, and the e-Services field for that question is required and starts blank, so the answer has to be made rather than left alone.
- An agent who wants off the list can update the answer at any time, by email to the ITIN Policy Section or through the e-Services application.
What the list contains
If you need an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number and you would rather not mail your passport to Austin, the usual advice is to find an IRS-approved acceptance agent. The IRS supports that advice with a directory. It is not one searchable database.
The directory is a set of ordinary web pages, one per state or country, most of them holding a plain two-column table. We collected every page in that directory on 2026-09-22. There were 120 of them that day, and 112 listed at least one agent while 8 listed none. Together the tables held 11,197 rows: 10,625 across 53 US jurisdictions and 572 across 59 foreign ones. Florida was the largest at 2,159 rows, followed by California at 1,352 and Texas at 1,296.
Every table has the same two columns, headed Name and Address. The address cell holds a street address, a city and postal code line, and a phone number. The IRS says acceptance agents are the ones marked with an asterisk, so the unmarked entries are the certifying ones. That difference matters for your passport: the IRS says a certifying acceptance agent authenticates your supporting documents and returns them to you immediately, while an acceptance agent reviews and mails those documents with the application.
So the directory hands you three facts per agent. A name, an address, a phone number. Most advice about choosing an agent skips straight past the middle one.
The address column is a location field, and it refuses a post office box
Agents now apply through the IRS e-Services system. The Internal Revenue Manual says that, beginning January 19, 2024, the application must be completed electronically through e-Services and paper Form 13551 applications are no longer accepted, and it adds a route through the CAA Document Upload Tool for organizations abroad whose principal, partner, owner or responsible parties have no SSN or ITIN to log in to e-Services. The manual also documents the fields in the electronic application, and one of them is the address that ends up on the published page.
Internal Revenue Manual 3.21.264.5.1, on the Business Address (Physical Location) field
Post office box (P.O. Box) is not permitted as part of the Business Address (Physical Location)
The field is named for what it wants. It asks for a physical location, not an address where you would prefer mail to arrive, so an agent who works from a spare bedroom is being asked for the address of that spare bedroom.
A mailing address has its own field, which appears only if the agent says the mailing address differs from the business address. An agent can receive IRS correspondence somewhere else. That does not change what the location field holds.
The manual also names the report behind the public list, Approved Applications for Published List of Acceptance Agents, and lists that report's columns as legal name, the doing-business-as name, Business Physical Location, the agent type, and the business phone number. The published address is the location field and not the mailing one.
The paper form asked the same thing while it lasted. Line 12 of Form 13551 told applicants to enter the complete street address where the business is located and added that a post office box will not be accepted as part of the address, and line 14 held the separate mailing address. The application changed channels in 2024. The question did not.
We counted the post office boxes
A rule written into an application is a claim about what should happen. We wanted to know whether it holds in the published data, so we ran a post office box pattern across all 11,197 rows.
We found one, on a foreign jurisdiction page.
One row in 11,197 is what a rule looks like when it holds in the published data. We should be honest about how much that proves on its own: the published column is the location field, and the location field is the one that bars post office boxes, so the count is partly the rule looking at itself. What it does settle is the reading. The directory is not a list of mailboxes. Those addresses are places, because the field that produced them asks for a place.
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A street address does not tell you it is an office
Knowing that post office boxes are excluded still leaves the more useful question open. A street address can be a suite in an office building, a storefront, or a house.
The USPS keeps a residential or business classification for the addresses in its Address Management System database, and it sells that classification as the Residential Delivery Indicator product so that carriers and shippers can tell those cases apart. We took the California page, drew a random sample of 300 of its 1,352 rows, and looked up that classification for each one. All 300 matched a USPS record, and 297 of them came back with a classification.
| USPS classification | Rows in sample | Share of sample |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial | 214 | 71.3% |
| Residential | 83 | 27.7% |
| No classification returned | 3 | 1.0% |
Random sample of 300 rows from the California acceptance agent page, drawn 2026-09-22 from 1,352 rows. Classification is the USPS Residential Delivery Indicator.
In that sample, more than one row in four carries an address the postal service treats as residential. We want to be careful about what that does and does not establish. The indicator describes how mail gets delivered to a location. It does not prove that a particular agent works from home, and it is a classification the postal service maintains rather than one the IRS assigns.
One thing is visible without any classification at all. Across the whole directory, 58.2 percent of the 11,197 rows carry a street line with no suite, unit, apartment, floor, room, building, level, or number designation on it. That is a text pattern rather than a judgment about the building, and we only looked up the postal classification in California.
Being on the list is a choice the application makes you make
None of this is something the IRS does to agents without asking. The Internal Revenue Manual section that governs the program is explicit that publication is opt-in.
IRM 3.21.264.4.4, Public Lists of Acceptance Agents
To be placed on the public list of Acceptance Agents kept on www.IRS.gov, the applicant must select Yes for the question do you want your firm/organization contact information on the IRS.gov public website? ... If the applicant does not want the information made available, the applicant must select No to the question. Acceptance Agents may update their answer at any time by sending an e-mail to the ITIN Policy Section or by updating their Application to Participate in the IRS Acceptance Agent Program in e-Services.
The same manual documents the e-Services field behind that question. The question reads: Do you want to be included on the published list of Acceptance Agents located on the IRS website? Yes and No are the options, the field is required, and it starts blank. There is no answer already sitting in it for the applicant to leave alone.
That is worth pausing on, because the same field list does pre-set answers elsewhere. The question asking whether the mailing address differs from the business address arrives already answered No, and it is the only yes-or-no question in that list that does. So the application is not indifferent about defaults. It sets none for publication, which means the answer on those pages was chosen by the applicant.
The paper form put the same choice in a box at line 19 that you had to tick. Its instruction read that the principal, partner or owner of the business may request to be included on a public list of acceptance agents published by the IRS on its website by checking this box. An unticked box meant no listing.
The part worth knowing is the last sentence of that manual section. The answer is not locked after approval. An agent who looks at their own row and does not like what it says can change the answer by email or in e-Services.
How to use the address when you are choosing an agent
You are handing someone your passport, or giving them a document they will authenticate and return on the spot. The directory gives you three fields to work with before you ever pick up the phone. Here is what each one can honestly carry.
The name tells you whether you are calling a person or a firm. The phone number tells you how to reach them. The address tells you what kind of place the work happens in, and that is the field that can shape the visit you are about to plan.
A residential classification is not a warning. Plenty of careful, IRS-approved agents run a one-person practice from home, and we found no facility requirement in the program's published requirements. What it does tell you is that showing up in person means going to someone's house, which is worth knowing before you arrange it rather than after.
It also explains why an agent's listing might have no suite number and no storefront to look up. That is not a red flag about the agent. It is what the location field asks for.
The one thing the address column cannot tell you is whether the listing is current. The IRS stamps each page with a review date, and the California page carried a stamp reading 17-Sep-2026 when we collected it. A review date covers the page, not each row, so call before you go.
What to do if you are the one going on a public list
Most readers of this site are not applying to be acceptance agents. The structure is still worth borrowing, because it repeats in the registrations we have read.
A form asks for a business location. The form refuses a post office box, so the honest answer is wherever the work happens. A separate question decides whether that answer becomes a public page. The two questions are asked at different moments, and in the forms we read for this piece, the second one did not mention the first.
We have counted home addresses reaching the public record twice before, once in an older California business registry snapshot and once in Florida's 2026 new filings, and both came out near two thirds. Those two counts asked a different question from this one. They compared the address on a filing against the owner's own address, while this sample asked the postal service how it classifies the address that was published. Two different instruments do not produce numbers you can line up, so we are not putting 27.7 percent next to those figures as if it were lower on the same scale.
If you are filling in that kind of form now, the useful move is to separate the two decisions before you submit. Decide what address is true for the location question. Then look for the publication question and answer it on purpose. If the address you would have to give is your home and you would rather it not be published, the answer is not a better mailbox, because the form already excluded mailboxes. The answer is having a real place of business to name.
You can check how any address is classified before you commit it to a form. Our address checker returns the same USPS classification we used for the California sample, so you can see what that classification says about an address before you write it down.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources & References
Primary sources this guide is based on.
- 1IRS · ITIN acceptance agents, including the jurisdiction list and agent type comparison (accessed September 22, 2026)
- 2USPS · Residential Delivery Indicator (RDI) product, which returns whether an address is classified residential or business in the USPS Address Management System (accessed September 22, 2026)
- 3IRS · Acceptance agents - California (accessed September 22, 2026)
- 4IRS · Form 13551, Application to Participate in the IRS Acceptance Agent Program, lines 12, 14 and 19 (Rev. 6-2019, paper form retired January 19, 2024) (accessed September 22, 2026)
- 5IRS · Internal Revenue Manual 3.21.264, ITIN Acceptance Agent Program, sections 3, 4.4, 5.1 and 9 (accessed September 22, 2026)
- 6IRS · ITIN Acceptance Agent Program, electronic application process (accessed September 22, 2026)
- 7IRS · Acceptance Agents' Guide for Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (Publication 4520) (accessed September 22, 2026)
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