Where’s My Child Tax Credit

The Internal Revenue Service’s Child Tax Credit lookup tool helps taxpayers that are eligible for receiving the advanced CTC payments. There are a lot of changes to the child tax credit 2024. Make sure you’re up to date with these changes.

If you claimed the child tax credit on your federal income tax return in 2021 for the 2020 taxes and your dependent is still within the age limit – which is increased to 18 – you’ll automatically receive the advanced payments to your bank account. If you opted to receive a paper check rather than the direct deposit and thus, the IRS doesn’t have your bank account information, you have to update your information using the lookup tool. In other words, you need to enroll in the advanced payments as the IRS doesn’t send out the advanced payments via check at the moment.

As similar as it is to the Where’s My Refund tool, the Child Tax Credit lookup tool can help you understand when you’re going to receive your advanced payment due to the credit. However, since the advanced payment dates are fixed, you don’t need to check it too often. In case something unexpected happens, and you don’t receive the funds, you can use the Where’s My Child Tax Credit tool to get the information in real-time.

Track child tax credit

Start tracking your CTC payment.

While the CTC lookup tool doesn’t have a feature where you can track the status of your payment, what you can do is see if anything is wrong with your payment. After entering your information to verify identity, see if the IRS has sent your payment or not. In a way, this is seen as tracking but not really, as you don’t know what happens after the IRS sends the payment. Generally, it takes less than 24 hours for the payment to show up in the receiver’s bank account, but it may take longer if the payment is sent on or closer to the weekend.

How much is my advanced payment?

The advanced child tax credit payment is half of the credit deserved. So, you’ll get $1,500 in total for every child between the age of 6 and 18. For children under the age of 6, the payment is increased to $1,800. 

Since the child tax credit is reduced after a certain amount, it’s highly recommended that you see if you can get the full amount. If not, the advanced payment isn’t going to be adjusted against these, so, you’ll end up owing the excess amount to the Internal Revenue Service. Such a scenario can make the credit do more bad than good.