BOSTON — The U.S. Internal Revenue Service will no longer mail out tax booklets to taxpayers, ending a decades-long practice that also served to signal the start of each tax-filing season.

Recognizing that most returns are now filed by computer, and in an effort to cut costs, the IRS will stop automatically mailing the paper packages effective with the coming filing season.

The IRS did not officially announce the policy change. Instead, the agency let tax preparers know via an electronic messaging system on Friday. IRS spokeswoman Peggy Riley confirmed the policy change on Monday in response to a Providence Journal inquiry.

The IRS will mail postcards to about 11.2 million taxpayers nationwide who would otherwise receive the booklets, letting them know about the change, said spokesman William M. Cressman. The agency expects to start mailing the postcards as soon as the end of this week, he said.

With the policy change, “What we’re saying is, we’re not going to automatically drop those packages in the mail,” he said.

People who still want paper forms and instructions will have to call the IRS to request them or obtain copies from an IRS office. The latest forms and instructions are not scheduled to be available until January, Cressman said.

(The IRS will also make forms and instructions available on its website, www.irs.gov. In addition, many public libraries and other locations make forms and instructions available, or print them at a patron’s request, during filing season.)

The IRS estimates that the new policy will save about $10 a million a year in paper, postage and other costs, Riley said.

The IRS has long mailed out the Form 1040 and instructions as part of a booklet sent to millions of taxpayers. The booklet typically went out after Christmas and arrived by early-to-mid January.

For generations, receipt of the booklet heralded the start of a new tax-filing season, a time to sharpen pencils and gather paperwork to make an annual accounting to the government.

Thus, the policy change signals the end of an era.

But it also is further evidence that another era has become well established.

During the most recent filing season, only about 8 percent of taxpayers nationwide received the tax package in the mail and used the form inside the package to do their return, Cressman said.

The remaining 92 percent either filed their own returns electronically, had preparers file their returns or used a paper form generated by other means, such as a computer printout, he said.

Of 495,198 individual federal income-tax returns filed from Rhode Island so far this year, a total of 357,695, about 72 percent, were filed electronically, Riley said, citing data as of Sept. 23.

Another reason the IRS decided to make the change now, for the coming filing season, is to trim expenses, Cressman said.

“All federal agencies are being asked to assess their costs, the costs of doing business,” he said.

Alan H. Litwin, managing director at Kahn, Litwin, Renza & Co., Ltd., a CPA firm based in Providence, said that most taxpayers nowadays have their returns filed electronically, a process known as e-filing.

Anyone who uses a paid preparer does not automatically receive a tax booklet in the mail the following tax season, Litwin said. Instead, they receive a postcard from the IRS essentially reminding them that tax season is coming.

State tax officials in Rhode Island and Massachusetts on Monday said they had no immediate plans to adopt the IRS policy change for state tax purposes.

In an interview at a Boston conference of state tax officials, Rhode Island Tax Administrator David M. Sullivan said, “We’ll certainly look at what [the IRS is] doing and see if that’s something we should be implementing in Rhode Island.”

But Sullivan added, “It’s extremely important to provide easy access to [Rhode Island] tax forms for Rhode Island citizens, and any change we might make will not impede that.”

Navjeet K. Bal, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, said that of about 3.4 million individual state income-tax returns the agency receives each year, only about 270,000 are from booklets the agency mails out.

“We’re really trying to push people toward electronic filing,” which she said is faster, less costly and less prone to error.

Cressman said that the IRS will no longer automatically mail the Form 1040, 1040A and 1040EZ booklets.

He said the IRS will also no longer automatically mail certain business tax packages, including those involving the Form 1120, Form 1065 and Publication 393.