Lack of awareness and confusion over eligibility prevented some families from getting child tax credit payments
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Author(s):
- Karpman, Michael, author Maag, Elaine, author
- Contributor(s):
- Urban Institute, issuing body.
- Publication:
- Washington, DC : Urban Institute, August 2022
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- Child Health -- economics Family Health Equity -- economics Health Policy Income Tax -- legislation & jurisprudence Social Mobility United States
- Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act temporarily expanded the child tax credit (CTC) to provide a credit of up to $3,000 per child ages 6 to 17 and up to $3,600 per child under age 6, even to families with very low incomes, including those not typically required to file a tax return. Families with children received up to half of the credit in monthly payments from July to December. By December, the US Department of the Treasury reported that the families of more than 61 million children had received these payments.1 Families could claim the remainder of the CTC by filing a tax return in the spring of 2022. The IRS delivered the payments automatically to most families based on information in their 2019 or 2020 federal income tax returns or their claims for pandemic stimulus checks. But eligible families of up to 4 million children did not receive the advance CTC payments (Cox et al. 2021). The families likely to have been left out of advance payments include those with very low incomes (many of whom were not required to file taxes), Hispanic families, and families with low education levels (Burnside 2022; Karpman et al. 2021). Families who did not receive the payments automatically could claim the CTC by submitting information to the IRS through an online portal. More than 115,000 families used the GetCTC.org nonfiler portal to claim benefits (Code for America 2022). Data from the Urban Institute’s December 2021 Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey show that one-quarter of adults with children reported they did not get the payments, and nearly one-third (32 percent) of them said the main reason was that they did not think their household was eligible (figure 1). Adults in families with incomes at or above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) were more likely to report this reason than adults with family incomes below 200 percent of FPL (37 versus 22 percent). Among adults in families with incomes below 200 percent of FPL, the share who reported they did not get the payments because they were unaware of how to claim the credit was 31 percent, a higher share than that among adults in families with higher incomes (19 percent). The share of adults who did not know how to claim the credit includes those who had not heard about the credit, did not know how to claim the credit, or could not find help filing tax forms or signing up for the credit.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-DC license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (3 pages))
- Illustrations:
- Illustrations
- NLM Unique ID:
- 9918471185406676 (See catalog record)
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9918471185406676