The popular child tax credit will receive a slight boost from President Trump’s signature tax and spending bill — but there are caveats.
Currently, taxpayers who make under $200,000 annually as a single filer, or $400,000 if filing jointly, can qualify for a partially refundable credit of up to $2,000 for each child they claim as a dependent who is under age 17 and a US citizen or qualifying noncitizen.
The new legislation increases the credit to a maximum $2,200 per child. Without the bill, the maximum credit would have reverted to $1,000.
But the increase, which amounts to a 10% bump, follows years of rising prices that have chipped away at the value of the original benefit. And many extremely low-income children — in addition to US citizen kids of undocumented parents — will be locked out of the payments altogether.
“If you’re already receiving the full credit amount, then you will benefit from this,” Joe Hughes, a senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told Yahoo Finance. “If you’re not, then you probably won’t benefit.”
Read more: Child tax credit: Everything you need to know
To qualify for the refundable portion of the child tax credit, which is called the “additional child tax credit” and can be worth up to $1,700, taxpayers must earn at least $2,500 in annual income. (A refundable tax credit can lower tax liability past zero, potentially generating a refund.) Families who make less than that receive no benefit, while many more children are in low-income households that earn just enough to receive part of the benefit but not enough to receive the full payment.
Due to those income restrictions, an estimated 17 million children are unable to receive the full child tax credit, according to the Tax Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank.
The average benefit for taxpayers with children who made between $10,000 and $20,000 in 2022, for example, was $800, according to the Congressional Research Service. That pay range includes people who worked full-time jobs at the federal minimum wage. Families earning between $200,000 and $500,000, meanwhile, saw an average benefit of $2,810.
Households where both parents lack a Social Security number — undocumented immigrants, including those whose children have a Social Security number and are US citizens — will also be shut out under the new law.
“We are excluding some of the most vulnerable kids that have very, very high poverty rates,” said Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, a professor at the Boston University School of Social Work. About 1.8 million children live in households where both parents are undocumented, she added.
There was a point when the benefits were less restrictive and more broadly accessible. Through the 2021 pandemic-era American Rescue Plan, the child tax credit was temporarily expanded from $2,000 to up to $3,600 per child in what some scholars and advocates hailed as one of the country’s greatest-ever antipoverty measures. Combined with stimulus payments, the tax credit hike helped slash child poverty rates by 46%, pushing them to their lowest level on record. When the child tax credit expansion lapsed at the end of 2021, those gains were reversed. At the time, the credit was fully refundable, meaning even the lowest-income families qualified.
As for the new tax bill, “basically what it’s doing is giving wealthier families a small boost,” said Adam Ruben, director of Economic Security Project Action, a left-leaning advocacy group. “But for lower-income and working-class families, they get nothing.”
Emma Ockerman is a reporter covering the economy and labor for Yahoo Finance. You can reach her at emma.ockerman@yahooinc.com.
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