Run a five-point check between October and December: operating system against the vendor sheet, RAM headroom at your real peak, storage growth, bandwidth, and a backup you have actually restored. Drake Tax 2026 requires Windows 11 or Windows Server 2019, 2022, or 2025, recommends 16 GB of RAM, and calls for a 25 Mbps or faster connection. A healthy recent server passes in under an hour; a failing one still has time to fix before January.
Key takeaways
Drake Tax 2026 requires Windows 11, or Windows Server 2019, 2022, or 2025 for server setups.
Drake recommends 16 GB of RAM and a 25 Mbps or faster internet connection.
Run the check October through December; nothing changes safely after mid-January.
Each fall’s release adds an install, so storage grows every year you keep prior seasons.
A recent, well-kept server often passes. The check tells you either way.
Table of Contents
Why run a server readiness check every fall?
Tax software vendors publish new system requirements every fall, and the releases install between October and December. A server that met last year’s spec can miss this year’s, and the miss surfaces in February, when queues are longest and nothing can be rebuilt. One hour in October beats a mid-season scramble.
Vendors name releases by tax year, so Drake Tax 2026 is the software your firm will file the 2027 season on, and it lands this fall. Each release resets the floor: the operating systems the vendor will stand behind, the memory it expects, the connection it assumes. Your server doesn’t get slower in January; the spec gets higher in October.
Treat the check like renewing your PTIN: an annual, dated task with a short window. Skip it and you find out mid-season, with clients in the lobby. One Drake firm ended up at Verito exactly that way:
“Verito came to our rescue when our software hosted directly at Drake failed and we could not access our files. We were back up in less than an hour.”
Raven Pyle-McCrackyn · Google, Dec 2025
What does Drake Tax 2026 require from your server?
Drake Tax 2026 supports Windows 11 on desktops and Windows Server 2019, 2022, or 2025 for server and hosted environments. Drake recommends 16 GB of RAM, lists no support for ARM devices, and calls for an internet connection of 25 Mbps or faster. Windows 10 is off the supported list.
The sheet to beat is Drake’s own published requirements (Drake Software system requirements, PDF). Read it against the machine your whole office shares, not the newest laptop in the building. An office server still on Windows Server 2016, or a “server” that is really a Windows 10 desktop under a desk, fails the first line of the sheet before RAM or bandwidth even come up.
If your firm files with Lacerte, ProSeries, or UltraTax, pull that vendor’s 2026 requirements sheet the same week you run this check. Each one publishes a new sheet every fall, and the floors move the same direction: newer OS versions, more memory, faster connections. The five-check review works unchanged; only the numbers in the second column come from your vendor.
One caution on the RAM line: on a shared server carrying several preparers at once, treat Drake’s 16 GB recommendation as a floor for the machine, not a sizing answer. Your own peak usage, measured, is the sizing answer.
What are the five checks in a pre-season server readiness review?
Five checks: operating system against the vendor sheet, RAM headroom at your real peak, storage growth from another year of installs and returns, bandwidth under full office load, and a backup you have actually restored. Each takes minutes on the machine itself, and together they tell you whether the fall installer lands clean.
Check
The number to beat
How to test it
Pass looks like
1. Operating system
Windows 11, or Windows Server 2019, 2022, or 2025, per the Drake Tax 2026 sheet
Run winver on the server and note the edition and build
Your OS is on the vendor’s supported list and still receiving updates
2. RAM headroom
Drake recommends 16 GB; your peak morning tells the real story
Open Resource Monitor during a busy morning and record used vs installed memory
Free memory at peak, with everyone logged in who will be logged in come March
3. Storage growth
Another season of installs, returns, and client PDFs
Check free disk space, then compare against last year’s growth
Room for the new install plus a full season of data without deleting prior years
4. Bandwidth
Drake calls for 25 Mbps or faster
Run a speed test on a weekday morning with the office working
Speeds above the vendor floor while everyone is on, not just after hours
5. Backup posture
A restore you have tested, not a backup you assume
Restore one client file from last week’s backup to a test folder
The file comes back readable, and you know how long the restore took
Three ways firms fail this review without noticing:
Testing bandwidth at 7pm, when the result measures an empty office instead of a working one.
Reading installed RAM off the spec sheet instead of watching used memory at a real peak.
Counting backup jobs that run on schedule but have never once been restored.
Backup earns its row twice over: it is one of the IRS Security Six, and a restore you timed in November is worth more than a job log from any month.
How much RAM and storage headroom does your firm actually need?
There is no honest per-user formula. Start from the vendor floor, Drake’s recommended 16 GB, then watch your own server during a peak morning: the gap between used and installed memory is your headroom. Storage is more predictable: each fall adds an install, and each April adds a season of returns.
Sizing by observation beats sizing by multiplication. Two five-person firms can pull wildly different memory at peak depending on how many programs each preparer keeps open, so any flat per-head number is wrong in one direction or the other. Watch the real number and buy against that.
On your own hardware, thin headroom means a purchase order: a RAM kit if the chassis has slots left, a new box if it doesn’t, and a maintenance window either way. That decision fits October, not January.
On VeritSpace, the same math works differently. RAM and storage are firm-wide totals, not per-seat allowances, and expandable on any plan: Essentials starts at 10 GB RAM and 40 GB NVMe storage total, Pro at 15 GB and 100 GB, Elite at unlimited RAM and 150 GB storage. Additional RAM is $20 per GB per month and additional storage $10 per 10 GB, so headroom becomes a request, not a hardware order. And the prior-year problem has its own rule: three years of a tax application count as one app slot, so keeping the 2024 and 2025 versions installed for amended returns doesn’t eat your plan.
What if your on-prem server passes the check?
Keep it, and write down what you found. A well-kept server bought in the last three or four years, running Windows Server 2019 or newer with real memory headroom and a tested restore, passes this check, and hosting would solve a problem you don’t have. Put the same check on the calendar for next October.
Plenty of firms pass. If yours does, the honest advice is to change nothing this year. Record the four numbers the check produced, used RAM at peak, free disk, measured bandwidth, and restore time, so next fall’s review is a five-minute diff instead of a fresh audit.
Two clocks eventually fail every on-prem box, and both are worth a line in your notes: the date your Windows Server version stops receiving updates, and the memory ceiling of the chassis. When either lands inside the next 12 months, start the replace-or-move conversation in the spring, on your schedule.
What if your server fails the check: repair or switch to hosting?
Repair makes sense when one item fails and the box is young: a RAM kit or a disk swap in October is cheap. When the operating system itself is off the vendor list, or the hardware can’t take more memory, you’re rebuilding anyway, and that’s when a hosted server earns the comparison.
A hosted desktop moves the whole checklist off your desk. On VeritSpace, the OS row, the patching, the headroom, and the 4x-daily backups with 60-day retention (90 on Elite) are Verito’s job to keep inside vendor spec, every season, on a dedicated private server that isn’t shared with another firm, which is why it runs 35% faster than shared hosting. Your Drake, Lacerte, or UltraTax desktop looks the way it did on the office machine; the machine underneath stops being your October project.
Plans are $69 per user per month on Essentials, $99 on Pro, and $149 on Elite, plus a $500 one-time setup. UltraTax requires the Pro tier and carries its own additional $500 setup, so an UltraTax firm should read the price as starting at $99. Behind it: 100% uptime since 2016, a real person answering in under 60 seconds, and an environment designed to support IRS Pub 4557 and FTC Safeguards requirements, with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification. That’s the setup 1,000+ tax and accounting firms run on, rated 4.9/5 across 170+ G2 reviews.
The move itself fits the pre-season window: 24 to 48 hours once your data is in hand, typically scheduled over a weekend so the office doesn’t lose working days, inside a one-to-two-week white-glove onboarding. Firms making their first move off an office server describe it about the way you’d hope:
“Verito is my first cloud experience. It has been a very easy transfer.”
John A., Owner, John Allgood CPA PC · G2, Mar 2025
When does the readiness window close?
Mid-December, in practice. The releases install October through December, white-glove onboarding to a hosted server takes one to two weeks, and the data move itself is 24 to 48 hours once your data is in hand. From mid-January to April 15, nobody should be changing servers at all.
Work backward from the day your 2026 software installs. Repairing? Parts ordered by early November leave time for a maintenance window and a re-test before the installer arrives. Switching? A migration weekend in November puts the new environment through the December install and a full dry run before clients show up. Either way, the check itself belongs in October, while every fix still has a calendar to land on.
And if the window closes on you, a server that passes the minimum spec can carry the season while you plan the real fix for May. What doesn’t work is discovering the gap in February. Run the hour in October; run it again next fall against whatever the vendors publish for 2027.
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Camren Majors is co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Verito Technologies, a cloud hosting and managed IT company built exclusively for tax and accounting firms. He is the co-author of Beyond Best Practices: Modernizing the Successful Accounting Firm (2026). His work has been featured in NATP TAXPRO Magazine and he has presented for NATP, NAEA, and NSA.
