After you file

You are not required to prepare and file a 2020 return with TurboTax to have access to past online returns.  You "might" have to simply answer a few questions first in order to have all the tabs appear, as I explain in my NOTE below.

 

There are a couple of possibilities for not being able to find prior returns prepared in Online TurboTax.

 

See this video first:

FAQ:  How do I access my prior year return?

https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/prior-year-return/help/how-do-i-access-my-prior-year-return/01/270...

 

NOTE:  When you log into TurboTax for the first time this year, you may not yet have the Tax Home tab and Documents tab visible in the left menu column.    If they're not there, then you may have to first proceed a little further by answering some preliminary screens and may even need to choose a 2020 product to get them to appear (you are not obligated to use it.)    Once you continue far enough to have those tabs, here are a couple of ways to get to the prior returns:

 

You can click on Documents in the left menu and then a dropdown list of years should appear.  Choose the year, and then way off to the right of the screen, you should see a link to download the PDF.    If that didn't work, here's another method:

 

Go to the Tax Home.  Scroll down the Tax Home page to the section "Your Tax Returns & Documents."  Expand that section and choose the tax year you want.   Then you can choose to "Download/print the PDF".

 

If you do all that, but there's no evidence of prior returns in that section "Your Tax Returns & Documents", then you likely have multiple accounts and signed into the wrong one.    Many people end up with multiple accounts.

You can have up to 5 accounts that use the same email address for notification purposes.  A User ID may be an email address, but it doesn't have to be.  It might be only part of an email address, or it can be anything at all.

 

To get a list of your User IDs, reset password, and recover account access, etc., you can use the tool at the link below.  When using the Account Recovery tool, try using your phone number first if you can still access it.   After that, if necessary, then run the tool on your email address(es) you can access.

NOTE: Before running the account recovery tool below, log out of all Intuit accounts including this user forum, or you might end up in a loop.  Then clear your browser Internet cache, close your browser, then reopen it, and go to the link below.  You may wish to copy this link so you can paste it into the new browser session.

https://myturbotax.intuit.com/account-recovery

If still no luck after running that on your phone number you can still access and email address(es) that you can access,  here's another method:

Go back to the tool again, but this time leave the data field blank, scroll down a bit, then choose the small blue link that says "Try something else", and it will look you up by SSN and other parameters.