Though Congress agreed in October to hike the nation’s borrowing authority through Feb. 7, the Treasury Department’s use of extraordinary measures will likely give lawmakers an additional month to haggle over a deal to raise the debt ceiling above $17.1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Tax refunds and revenue in the spring could push the deadline even further to May or early June, the CBO said.

Such an extension over the debt limit could ease the workload for lawmakers who are staring down a murderers’ row of deadlines: A mid-December target to wrap up a bicameral budget conference; a mid-January expiration of government funding; and a February debt limit deadline.

But the longer Congress waits to act, the more the electoral politics of 2014 will come into play, potentially complicating a lift of the debt ceiling that is never easy anyway. Typically, Republicans have attempted to use a debt ceiling hike as a way to win spending cuts or other structural reforms while President Barack Obama warned he will not negotiate over the debt limit.

And a Treasury official said that Congress might have a shorter leash than CBO predicts, anyway.

“There’s no indication right now that extraordinary measures would last longer than a month. Due to inherent variability, the numbers can go either way — and sooner rather than later is probably more likely in this instance, due to the late open of the filing season,” the official said.

In October, Congress came just hours within exhausting the United States’ borrowing authority before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) struck a deal to reopen the government and avoid a potentially catastrophic path toward a debt default.