We inspected 134 official government form entries: 96% have form fields, 85% carry an XFA layer, 4% are flat.

1. 1

   85% of the forms carry an XFA package on top of their AcroForm fields.

   114 of 134 analyzed entries contain an /XFA entry: 67 of 68 IRS forms, 24 of 26 USCIS forms, 10 of 13 California court forms, and every SSA and VA form tested. All 114 also have AcroForm fields. None triggered our dynamic-XFA heuristic, but this structural inspection does not establish compatibility with Chrome, Firefox, Preview, mobile viewers or Acrobat. XFA and AcroForm data can diverge after filling. Inspect a saved copy in the recipient's viewer; removing XFA is one conversion option, not a guarantee that scripts, validation or appearance will be preserved.

2. 2

   Flat PDFs come from agencies you would expect to be further along.

   5 of 134 entries have no form fields: WH-347 (DOL), DS-3053 (State Dept), Form DS-64 (State Dept), USPS Form 1583 (Other US federal), Starter Checklist (UK HMRC). All 5 have a detectable text layer, and 4 still contain an empty AcroForm dictionary. This does not tell us whether fields were removed or never added. No file triggered our first-page scan heuristic; later pages were not classified as text versus image.

3. 3

   34% are encrypted, and all of them still allow filling.

   45 forms open with an empty user password but carry owner restrictions. Filling is permitted on all 45; modifying the document is denied on 44; adding annotations is denied on 16 (SF-15, FL-300, FW-001, FL-150, FL-341(D), CM-010, 130-U, Kindergeld KG1, FL-100, FL-110, FL-120, FL-165, FL-170, MC-025, MC-030, MC-031). USCIS encrypts 24 of 26 forms and the California Judicial Council encrypts all 13; the IRS encrypts 0 of 68. These bits are honored by viewers, not enforced by cryptography.

4. 4

   Half of the fillable forms name their fields with codes, not words.

   63 of 129 fillable forms (49%) have fewer than 10% of fields with a readable name; 61 of those are IRS forms, whose fields are called f1_1[0], f1_2[0] and so on. USCIS, SSA, VA and the newer California forms use names such as LastName or ClaimantSSN. For anyone mapping a spreadsheet onto a form, "fillable" and "mappable" are not the same property.

5. 5

   The median fillable form has 91 fields; the largest has 1,851.

   The 129 fillable forms hold 19,512 fields in total: 14,207 text fields, 5,029 checkboxes, 202 dropdowns, 58 radio groups and 16 signature fields. The mean is 151.3 because a few forms are very large: Form 709 (1,851 fields, 10 pages), Form I-129 (980 fields, 38 pages), Form I-485 (760 fields, 24 pages), Form W-2 (568 fields, 11 pages). The longest by page count are Form I-129 (38 pages), Form I-485 (24 pages), Form 1040-ES (16 pages). The smallest fillable form, Form G-1145, has 6 fields.

6. 6

   87% were produced with Adobe LiveCycle or Adobe Designer.

   116 of 134 entries name a Designer product in their metadata; this records what the file reports, not an independently verified production history. 120 entries declare PDF 1.7, 13 declare 1.6 and 1 declares 1.5. The oldest printed revision strings detected in the sample are MC-031 (July 1, 2005), MC-030 (January 1, 2006), MC-025 (July 1, 2009), Form 8832 (12-2013); this is not a check of current filing eligibility.

7. 7

   9 of 137 issuer landing pages returned 404 while the PDF itself was still online.

   On September 2, 2026, the landing pages for Form 4506-C, Form 433-D, Form 14039, Form I-130A, Form 433-F, Form 433-A, Schedule 1 (Form 1040), Schedule 2, Schedule 3 (Form 1040) answered HTTP 404 to the collection client, although each PDF was served from the agency document path. 2 EPFO forms (India) returned HTTP 403 from our collection location; this does not prove geographic blocking. 1 HMRC form (SC2) is published as an online form only. Those 3 forms are counted in the total but not in the analysis. These are dated observations, not a claim that the links remain broken today.

134 analyzed rows and 3 rows with a status instead of a verdict. The CSV below carries the remaining columns: file size, PDF version, producer, revision, field counts by type and the permission bits.