A new child tax credit is coming next year, bringing significant changes that will alter how much assistance families receive — and which families can receive it.

With his tax and spending package, President Donald Trump passed a permanent change to the child tax credit spearheaded by congressional Republicans. It goes into effect for families filing income tax returns in 2026. 

The changes increase the total amount of the tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200, and index it to inflation so it grows over the years, a change advocates have championed for years. However, the package also introduces new parameters to qualify for the credit that will directly affect immigrants and the lowest-income families.

For the first time, children and at least one of their parents or guardians will have to have a Social Security number to be able to qualify for the child tax credit. That means an estimated 2.7 million American kids who likely qualify for the credit this year will no longer be able to get it as of next year. 

The tax credit was passed in 1997. Families have used it to help cover basic needs like food and also wants, like getting their children into extracurricular activities. 

But for its nearly 30-year history, the credit has been structured in a way that families with the lowest incomes couldn’t get the full amount. With the most recent change, and because the credit phases in depending on income and the number of children you have, families have to earn more before they can claim the full amount.

Democrats had been pushing to change those requirements in recent years so that the lowest-income families could get more of the credit, but Republicans pushed back, saying it disincentivized people to work. 

Under the new child tax credit, an estimated 19 million children are now blocked from receiving the full amount, compared with 17 million currently, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, which has done much of the research and analysis on the child tax credit. The share of children from marginalized backgrounds who are not going to be able to receive the full amount has also gone up for each group:

• 48 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native children (from 45 percent under the current law)
• 45 percent of Black children (from 41 percent)
• 39 percent of Latinx children (from 34 percent)
• 60 percent of children of single mothers (from 55 percent)
• 35 percent of children in rural parts of the country (from 30 percent)

“Families of all sizes are going to need higher levels of income to be eligible for the full credit amount,” said Christopher Yera, a research analyst at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The child tax credit is being cut at a time when other vital services for low-income Americans are seeing reduction.

Under the same tax package, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is losing $186 billion in funding through 2034, affecting eligibility for free school meals and for families that rely on the assistance to put food on the table. Another $1 trillion will be cut from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the next decade. 

“All these families that are going to lose access to basic needs, it would be handy if the folks harmed by that were actually reached by the child tax credit,” said Meredith Dodson, the senior director of public policy for the Coalition on Human Needs who has been lobbying for an expansion of the credit.

Here is a breakdown of how the new child tax credit works and how to access it: 

What is the child tax credit?

The child tax credit is a return parents and guardians receive in their taxes annually for every child under the age of 17 in their care. Stepchildren, foster children, half siblings and descendants, including grandchildren and nieces or nephews, may also qualify if the tax filer is their main caretaker.

Since 2017, the most families could claim from the credit is $2,000 per child, and that amount goes down after a certain threshold. 

Guardians who earn very little or nothing have never been able to claim the full amount of the credit except for in 2021, when it temporarily expanded during the pandemic.

What is the new child tax credit amount? 

For the 2025 tax filing year, the child tax credit will increase to $2,200. Eligible parents will see this amount in their tax returns next year. 

The credit will also be adjusted annually to account for inflation beginning in 2026.

Who qualifies for the new child tax credit? 

If filing a single return, parents and guardians must have a Social Security number to access the credit. This is a significant departure from prior years when only the children, but not the adults claiming them, had to have a Social Security number. 

For parents and guardians who are filing jointly, only one parent has to have a Social Security number to qualify. That means some mixed-status households will be able to qualify for the credit. 

To be able to claim a child, the child has to have: 

• Lived with the parent or caregiver for at least six months during 2025 (though there are some exceptions)
• Lived six months or more in the United States
• Have a Social Security number

The shift is part of a years-long effort to limit immigrants’ access to government services. Before 2017, any child living in the United States was eligible for the child tax credit. Then Trump’s tax cuts package in 2017 changed that rule to require that the child have a Social Security number to qualify. Their parents could use an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, to file their taxes and still be eligible for the credit. Now at least one of those parents will need to also have a Social Security number. 

Families headed by an undocumented single parent, where the child is an American citizen, will not get the child tax credit at all. 

“Instead of actually expanding the [child tax credit], they took it away from millions of kids,” Dodson said. “There are important changes [in the law] but they kind of miss the mark when the whole thing is leaving out the folks who need it the most.”

Does everyone who qualifies get $2,200? 

No. Families who earn less than $2,500 a year do not receive anything. After that, the credit begins to phase in depending on how much families earn. (Keep reading for exact figures)

Some families earn little and owe no taxes. Those families are eligible for only a portion of the child tax credit, up to $1,700 in 2025. That means that even if your tax liability is zero, you can still receive a check for up to $1,700 for the child tax credit.

Then, the credit starts to phase out once families earn too much to qualify for the full amount. For a single filer, the credit starts to decrease for any amount they earn past $200,000; for joint filers the threshold is $400,000. Caregivers earning more than $240,000 for a single filer and $440,000 for joint filers do not receive anything. 

What is the minimum you need to earn to qualify for the full amount? 

According to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University: 

• Families with one child: A single filer needs to earn at least $28,700; joint filers need to earn at least $36,500. 
• Families with two children: A single filer needs to earn at least $33,700; joint filers need to earn at least $41,500.
• Families with three children: A single filer needs to earn at least $38,700; joint filers need to earn at least $46,500. 
• Families with four children: A single filer needs to earn at least $45,800; joint filers need to earn at least $51,500. 

Who doesn’t qualify? 

Children who don’t have a Social Security number don’t qualify. Single parents or guardians who don’t have a Social Security number also don’t qualify, even if the child does have a Social Security number. 

An estimated 28 percent of children will not qualify for the full amount because their parents earn too little. That is up from 25 percent previously, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Policy at Columbia. The share of kids who are ineligible because their parents earn too much stays the same, at 4 percent.

The states with the largest share of children who don’t qualify for the full amount are Mississippi (40.6 percent), Louisiana (38.2 percent), New Mexico (38.2 percent), Alabama (35.1 percent) and Kentucky (34.9 percent). 

How do you claim the credit in your taxes? 

Filers must include their children or dependents on Form 1040, the Individual Income Tax Return, and also complete a Schedule 8812.

Is this like the child tax credit in 2021? 

No. In 2021, that credit was expanded to give families up to $3,600, much of it in the form of monthly checks, instead of an annual lump sum. The 2021 expansion allowed the poorest families in the country, those who don’t file income taxes, to access the child tax credit for the first time in its history. Those pandemic-era changes cut the child poverty rate in 2021 to a historic low of 5.2 percent. 

But the temporary changes lasted only a year, and an effort by Democrats to make them permanent failed. The tax credit then reverted back to its usual amount — $2,000 — and the child poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022. 

Is this a temporary change or a permanent one? 

This is a permanent change. Previous child tax credit expansions have been in place for a set number of years and when it was time for those changes to expire, lawmakers renegotiated the new parameters. 

That is why the child tax credit came up this year — changes put in place in 2017 were set to expire in 2025. 

What the new version does differently is make the changes permanent. Lawmakers can still tweak the credit if they want to later, but there is no set date where the changes will end and the credit will revert back to a former amount. 

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