Which years of Donald Trump’s federal tax returns were released by the House Ways and Means Committee and what specific pages were included?
Executive summary
The House Ways and Means Committee obtained and publicly released six years of Donald J. Trump’s federal tax returns covering tax years 2015 through 2020 [1] [2] [3]. The released materials comprise nearly 6,000 pages in total, split between more than 2,700 pages of individual returns for Mr. and Mrs. Trump and roughly 3,000 pages of business-entity returns, packaged by the committee as Attachment E and organized by year and return type [4] [2].
1. Which years were released — the plain answer
The committee’s disclosure covers tax years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 — six consecutive years that include Mr. Trump’s final year in office and the year he announced his 2016 presidential bid [1] [2] [3].
2. How the materials were organized when published
When the committee published the records it labeled the trove’s core files as Attachment E and divided that attachment into individual returns and business returns, with sub-files for each return year and related reconciliation or AMT (alternative minimum tax) schedules where applicable [2] [4]. PBS’s inventory of attachments explicitly lists, by year, items such as the 2015 individual return, the 2015 AMT form, business returns for 2015, continuing through individual and business returns for 2020, plus intermediate reconciliation reports for some years [4].
3. What “pages” and document types were included
The public package spans nearly 6,000 pages total: more than 2,700 pages of individual returns for Donald and Melania Trump, and more than 3,000 pages of entity and business returns for Trump-related companies [4]. The committee’s Attachment E thus contains full individual 1040s and supporting schedules for 2015–2020, business tax returns and related passthrough schedules, and reconciliation exhibits such as passthrough income and AMT reconciliation reports for select years [4] [2].
4. Redactions, sensitive information and procedural context
Before public release, the committee voted to make the returns public but applied redactions for sensitive data such as Social Security and bank account numbers, and the committee proceeded only after litigation that reached the Supreme Court’s orbit; the returns were released in late December 2022 with those redactions in place [1] [5]. The committee had earlier voted 24–16 to release the returns, illustrating the partisan split over whether the public release was necessary and how far Congress’s subpoena power should reach [6].
5. What was not part of this committee release and notable caveats
The Ways and Means release did not purport to be a multi-decade disclosure; independent reporting (e.g., The New York Times) previously obtained longer stretches of Trump tax materials that the Times did not publicly publish, and other documents — like two pages of a 2005 return that leaked in 2017 — are not part of the committee’s Attachment E package [3]. Reporting and the committee’s own materials make clear that what was released was the six-year set obtained under the IRS presidential audit program and organized as the committee’s attachments [2] [4].
6. Competing narratives and political reactions
Democrats framed the release as oversight into presidential audit practices and tax compliance, while Republicans warned that the precedent could be abused in the future and criticized publicizing private tax information; that partisan divide tracked committee votes and public commentary around the release [5] [7] [6]. Media coverage emphasized both the substance — such as low federal tax payments in several of those years — and the broader questions about congressional authority and privacy [8] [5].