State Fact Sheets: How Are Families Using the Child Tax Credit?

Updated on September 24, 2021, and originally posted September 14, 2021, by the Annie E. Casey Foundation

Thanks to child tax credit, families more able to meet food needs of children

The Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion has long endorsed an increase in the child tax cred­it (CTC) — and oth­er poli­cies — to improve the lives of kids and fam­i­lies. Enact­ed in March 2021, the fed­er­al Amer­i­can Res­cue Plan sig­nif­i­cant­ly strength­ened the child tax cred­it to include, for the first time, reg­u­lar month­ly pay­ments to par­ents. This proac­tive sup­port will reach 88% of chil­dren and youth nation­wide, a life­line for par­ents try­ing to pay rent, buy food and clothes, save for their chil­dren’s edu­ca­tion and meet oth­er crit­i­cal needs.

To demon­strate the imme­di­ate impact of the child tax pay­ments, the Casey Foun­da­tion recent­ly part­nered with the Social Pol­i­cy Insti­tute at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty to devel­op easy-to-read fact sheets that include data from the U.S. Cen­sus Bureau’s House­hold Pulse Sur­vey. These fact sheets show how fam­i­lies mak­ing less than $150,000 a year are using the cred­it and what kind of a dif­fer­ence it is mak­ing in their lives.

The data pre­sent­ed on the fact sheets were col­lect­ed between July 21, 2021, and August 16, 2021, cov­er­ing the peri­od in which the first two child tax cred­it pay­ments were deposit­ed in fam­i­lies’ bank account. 

In addi­tion to the fact sheets, the Social Pol­i­cy Insti­tute released a nation­al report on how fam­i­lies intend­ed to use the child tax cred­it pay­ments based on sur­veys from July 8132021.

Nation­al and State Data on Child Tax Cred­it Payments

These fact sheets include key data on recip­i­ents, pay­ment usage and hard­ship or food secu­ri­ty reduc­tion. Addi­tion­al state fact sheets are avail­able on the Social Pol­i­cy Insti­tute’s website.

Find more data about chil­dren and fam­i­lies from the House­hold Pulse Sur­vey on the KIDS COUNT Data Center.

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