Comments close 23 November. The new rules bind 39 days later

The IRS posted Notice 2026-55 on 22 September 2026. It is not a rule. It is a request for comments about what a rule should say: which provisions of the section 1400Z-2 regulations should be "retained, modified, or supplemented."

Comments should be submitted by 23 November 2026, through regulations.gov under docket IRS-2026-1156. Later ones will still be considered if that does not delay guidance, so the deadline is a request rather than a wall.

The number that matters

Thirty-nine. That is the calendar distance from 23 November 2026, when the comment window closes, to 1 January 2027, when the rewritten Opportunity Zone regime starts applying to new money in a qualified opportunity fund.

By this paper's count, reading the comments, drafting, review and publication would all have to fit inside those 39 days for anything from this notice to land before the regime does. The 2020 final regulations stay in force meanwhile, alongside the transitional guidance in Notice 2026-40, so 1 January does not arrive to an empty shelf. What is missing is the layer written for the new statute.

A second clock runs ahead of both: state chief executives must submit tract nominations by 28 September 2026, five days from publication. That is 56 days before comments close.

How the thing works

When an investor sells an asset at a gain, the code allows the gain to be rolled into a qualified opportunity fund instead of being taxed that year. The fund invests it in property or a business inside a designated census tract.

For amounts invested after 31 December 2026, the deferred gain is included in income no later than five years after the investment. For those same investments, five years of holding raises basis by 10 percent of the deferred gain, 30 percent in a qualified rural fund; ten years, with a section 1400Z-2(c) election, sets basis at fair market value, with a stop at 30 years. That comes from section 70421 of Public Law 119-21, enacted 4 July 2025.

Notice 2026-55 changes none of it. Two of its six questions carry the most money.

The first is the working capital safe harbor: the rule letting a business inside a zone hold cash for up to 31 months, in cash equivalents or debt instruments of 18 months or less, without failing the test that keeps nonqualified financial property under 5 percent of its property basis, provided it works to a written plan. The notice asks whether that plan may be amended mid-project and what "substantially consistent" should mean. Nobody reads that clause until month thirty-one.

The second is housing, prompted by Executive Order 14394 of 13 March 2026, at 91 F.R. 13207. The IRS asks what legal authority would let a fund defer the gain on each house it builds and sells when the proceeds go back into the business. It then cites its own 2020 preamble, at 85 F.R. 1866, 1931-1932, which concluded the statute defers gain only at the QOF-owner level. The agency is asking the public to supply authority its own preamble said was not there.

Who this lands on locally

New Jersey carried 169 zones out of the 2018 round. One is census tract 7152 in Lakewood, one of 11 zones in Ocean County, per the OpportunityDb tract profile. Brooklyn holds 125 designated tracts.

Commercial Observer reported on 21 September 2026 that New York expects to designate roughly 426 tracts this round. Counts of the old New York map differ: 514 in one dataset, 524 in Commercial Observer's.

Nothing carries over on its own. A 2018 tract has to be nominated again, and has to clear the tightened income test, now 70 percent of state or metropolitan median family income instead of 80, with a new cap of 125 percent for tracts qualifying on poverty rate. The contiguous-tract route from the 2017 law is gone.

What to watch

28 September 2026: nominations due, extension to 28 October. 26 October 2026: comments close on the separate proposed regulations published 11 September on fund reporting and certification. 5 November 2026: the telephonic hearing on those. 23 November 2026: comments close on Notice 2026-55.

Three dates, two of them comment deadlines. Only the last belongs to this notice. Every filing is published on the docket, so the trade groups' arguments will be readable as they arrive. Watch whether Treasury publishes anything between 23 November and 1 January.

This article describes a proposed federal process. It is not tax advice.