Child Tax Credit 2027: $2,300 per Child, $1,800 Refundable (IRS)

Every autumn brings the same small collision of numbers on tax-planning sites: one figure for the next return to be filed, in early 2027, covering tax year 2026 — and a different, larger figure for the return that won’t be filed until 2028, covering tax year 2027. The child tax credit is walking through exactly that collision this year, and it’s worth separating the two clearly before going further. The short answer: for tax year 2026, the IRS confirmed a $2,200 credit per qualifying child, with up to $1,700 of that refundable. For tax year 2027, the IRS confirmed $2,300 per child, with $1,800 refundable, in Revenue Procedure 2026-35, section 3.05, released November 5, 2026 (news release IR-2026-133). Both 2027 numbers match what the statutory inflation formula projected in September, using cost-of-living data the government had already published.

The statute doing the work

The child tax credit’s current dollar amounts trace back to 26 U.S.C. § 24. Section 24(h)(2) instructs that the base credit amount in subsection (a) — historically $1,000 — be substituted with $2,200. That $2,200 figure isn’t a temporary provision anymore: Public Law 119-21, the 2025 tax law, struck the sunset date that would have let the higher credit expire after 2025 and made the $2,200 base permanent going forward. The same law is what set $2,200 as the figure for tax year 2025 itself.

From there, section 24(h) lays out several other numbers that move independently. Section 24(h)(3) sets the phase-out threshold at $400,000 for a joint return and $200,000 for any other filing status — flat dollar figures, not tied to inflation. Section 24(h)(4) creates a separate $500 credit for dependents who don’t qualify as a “qualifying child” for this purpose, such as an older dependent relative — also flat. Section 24(h)(5) sets the base figure for the refundable portion at $1,400 per child. Section 24(h)(6) sets the earned-income floor used in the refundable calculation at $2,500. And section 24(h)(7) requires a Social Security number for both the qualifying child and, with an exception for joint filers, the taxpayer claiming the credit.

Two of those numbers move every year, and the rest don’t. Section 24(i) is the inflation-adjustment provision, and it applies to exactly two figures: the $2,200 base credit, for tax years beginning after 2025, and the $1,400 refundable base, for tax years beginning after 2024. Both are adjusted using the cost-of-living formula in section 1(f)(3) — the same mechanism this site’s 2027 IRS inflation adjustments tracker follows across dozens of other figures — with one modification: the credit-amount adjustment substitutes “2024” for the formula’s usual base year, while the refundable-amount adjustment substitutes “2017.” Any increase that isn’t already a multiple of $100 gets rounded down to the next lowest multiple of $100. Everything else in section 24(h) — the $400,000 and $200,000 thresholds, the $500 other-dependent credit, the $2,500 earned-income floor — stays exactly where the statute set it, indefinitely, unless Congress amends the law again.

Reproducing 2026 before trusting 2027

Any formula that claims to predict a number the IRS hasn’t announced should first be checked against a number the IRS has already announced. Revenue Procedure 2025-32, section 4.05, confirms both figures for tax year 2026 in plain language: “the maximum amount of the credit allowed under § 24(a) is $2,200,” and “the amount used in § 24(d)(1)(A) to determine the amount of the credit under § 24 that may be refundable is $1,700.” The same revenue procedure’s section 3.03 explains why $2,200 needed confirming at all: the 2025 tax law set $2,200 as the fixed figure for tax year 2025, then made it subject to inflation adjustment for every tax year after that.

Running the section 1(f)(3) cost-of-living mechanics on the confirmed 2026 window reproduces both numbers cleanly. The unrounded credit amount comes out to $2,252.06 — an increase of $52.06 over the $2,200 base, which rounds down to the next lowest multiple of $100. Since $52.06 doesn’t reach $100, it rounds down to zero, leaving the credit at exactly $2,200, matching the official figure. The refundable amount comes out to $1,793.69, an increase of $393.69 over the $1,400 base; rounded down to the nearest $100, that’s a $300 increase, landing at $1,700 — again matching the official figure exactly. That’s the same mechanism used below for 2027, not a different one built after the fact to hit a target.

The August 2026 data point, and the one complication

Section 1(f)(3)‘s cost-of-living formula runs on a twelve-month window: the average of the chained CPI-U, tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics under series SUUR0000SA0, over the twelve months ending August 31 of the year before the tax year in question. For the 2027 figures, that means the window running from September 2025 through August 2026 — and the Bureau of Labor Statistics published the last reading that window needs, for August 2026, on September 11, 2026, at an index value of 185.739. Once that number was out, the calculation had everything it required. The IRS publishing the resulting dollar figure, on November 5, 2026, was a separate, later administrative step, and it confirmed the projection.

There is one real wrinkle inside that window, though, and it deserves to be named plainly rather than smoothed over. The Bureau of Labor Statistics never published a CPI-U reading for October 2025, because data collection stopped during that year’s government shutdown. Anyone reconstructing the twelve-month average has to choose between two defensible approaches: average the eleven months that were actually published, or fill the gap with an imputed estimate for the missing month. For the credit amount, averaging the eleven published months gives an unrounded figure of $2,325.13; imputing the missing month instead gives $2,322.24. Those are about three dollars apart — and both clear the $2,300 rounding step by a comfortable margin, somewhere between $22 and $25 past the line, which is enough room that the missing October data didn’t change the answer even though it was a genuine open question elsewhere. The IRS averaged the eleven published months and left October 2025 out, and our eleven-month projection was exact: $2,300 and $1,800. For the refundable amount, the same two approaches give $1,851.89 and $1,849.59, both landing well past $1,800 with roughly $50 of room to spare. Put differently: for the credit to fall back to $2,200 instead of stepping up to $2,300, the underlying 2024 base-year average would have needed to come in above roughly 174.69, well above the 173.016 actually recorded. This wasn’t a coin-flip projection sitting right on a rounding line — it was a projection with real distance from the number that would have kept it flat.

What doesn’t move

It’s worth being direct about what the 2027 inflation adjustment does not touch, because the child tax credit has more moving parts than most people assume, and only two of them are adjusted for inflation at all. The $400,000 and $200,000 phase-out thresholds are unchanged from 2026 to 2027 — they are fixed dollar amounts in the statute, not indexed figures, so a family’s income doesn’t need to cross any new line to keep the same phase-out exposure it had the year before. The $500 credit for a dependent who isn’t a qualifying child — an aging parent, for instance, or an older child who no longer qualifies under the credit’s age rules — stays at $500 in both years. And the $2,500 earned-income floor used in the refundable-credit formula, discussed below, also stays flat. The only two numbers moving between 2026 and 2027 are the $2,200-to-$2,300 maximum credit and the $1,700-to-$1,800 maximum refundable amount.

Schedule 8812, line by line

The mechanics of actually claiming the credit run through Schedule 8812, and the final 2026 form, stamped “Created 8/18/26” and now posted on IRS.gov, lays out the sequence clearly. Apart from the draft watermark, its text matches the April 24, 2026 draft line for line; only the creation stamp differs. Line 1 starts with the amount from Form 1040, line 11b — adjusted gross income, though the line reference itself moved from line 11a on the prior year’s form. The draft 2026 Form 1040 labels its line 11b “Amount from line 11a (adjusted gross income),” so the figure is the same one; only the line you copy it from changed. Lines 2a through 2d add back certain excluded foreign and territorial income, for filers who have it. Line 3 combines those. Line 4 counts the number of qualifying children who have the required Social Security number, and line 5 multiplies that count by the per-child credit amount — $2,200 for tax year 2026. Line 6 counts other dependents, and line 7 multiplies that by $500. Line 8 adds lines 5 and 7 together.

Line 9 is where the phase-out threshold enters — $400,000 for a joint return, $200,000 otherwise — and line 10 subtracts that threshold from the line 3 income figure, rounding the result up to the next multiple of $1,000. The form itself prints a concrete example of that rounding rule on line 10: if the result is $425, enter $1,000; if the result is $1,025, enter $2,000. Line 11 multiplies that rounded figure by 5%, which is simply the $50-per-$1,000 phase-out rate written as a percentage, and line 12 subtracts that from line 8. Line 13 pulls in a separate credit limit worksheet tied to the filer’s actual tax liability (more on that below), and line 14 takes the smaller of lines 12 and 13 — that’s the nonrefundable portion, flowing to Form 1040, line 19.

Part II-A of the form is where the refundable calculation lives. Line 16a takes what’s left of line 12 after line 14 is subtracted out — in other words, credit that couldn’t be used against tax liability. Line 16b multiplies the qualifying-child count by the refundable maximum per child, $1,700 for tax year 2026. Line 17 takes the smaller of those two lines. Lines 18 through 20 build the earned-income side: line 18a is earned income, line 18b reports nontaxable combat pay separately, and line 19 subtracts $2,500 from the line 18a amount — the earned-income floor set in section 24(h)(6). Line 20 multiplies that result by 15%, which is the rate written into section 24(d)(1)(B)(i). The form then asks whether the line 16b amount is $5,100 or more — the threshold for three or more qualifying children, since three times $1,700 is $5,100. If it is not, a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico goes to line 21; everyone else skips Part II-B and enters the smaller of line 17 or line 20 on line 27. If it is, the form says that if line 20 is equal to or more than line 17, you skip Part II-B and enter the amount from line 17 on line 27; otherwise you go to line 21. Part II-B, titled “Certain Filers Who Have Three or More Qualifying Children and Bona Fide Residents of Puerto Rico,” uses withheld Social Security and Medicare taxes as an alternative refundable calculation. So reaching $5,100 does not by itself send a family there, and a Puerto Rico resident can land there with fewer children. With the refundable maximum at $1,800 for tax year 2027, that same three-or-more-children threshold in Part II-B would logically move to $5,400 — three times $1,800 — though that is a mechanical result of the form’s own math, not a figure the revenue procedure prints.

One line in this part of the form changed numbers between years. Line 22 asks for the total of Schedule 1, line 15; Schedule 2, line 16c; and Schedule 2, line 17c. The 2025 form listed Schedule 2, lines 5, 6 and 13. These are the same taxes under new numbers: on the draft 2026 Schedule 2, line 16c adds line 16a (Social Security and Medicare tax on unreported tip income, Form 4137) and line 16b (uncollected Social Security and Medicare tax on wages, Form 8919), which were lines 5 and 6, and line 17c is the uncollected Social Security and Medicare or RRTA tax on tips or group-term life insurance from Form W-2, box 12, formerly line 13. If you are completing Part II-B and your employer withheld, or you paid, Additional Medicare Tax or tier 1 railroad retirement (RRTA) tax, the instructions send you to their Additional Medicare Tax and RRTA Tax Worksheet to figure line 21. That worksheet now points to Form 8959 line 18 where it used to say line 13, Form 8959 line 11 where it said line 17, and Form W-2 box 14a where it said box 14.

The draft instructions for the 2026 form spell out the two headline figures in their own reminders section, in plain language: “The maximum amount of CTC for each qualifying child is $2,200,” and “The maximum amount of ACTC for each qualifying child is $1,700” — ACTC being the additional child tax credit, the formal name for the refundable portion. The same instructions also address the Social Security number requirement directly: on a joint return, only one filer needs a valid Social Security number, while the other can file using either a Social Security number or an individual taxpayer identification number, as long as it was issued on or before the return’s due date. And they flag a refund-timing rule that trips up filers every year regardless of the dollar figures involved: the IRS cannot issue refunds before mid-February 2027 for any return that properly claims the additional child tax credit, and that delay applies to the entire refund, not just the portion tied to this credit. Unlike the 2025 instructions, the 2026 draft has no “What’s New” section; the $2,200 amount, the Social Security number rule and the Trump account election all appear under “Reminders” instead. Nothing in the 2026 draft is labeled as new, even though it adds one paragraph on who can receive the refundable part, covered below.

Line 13 and Credit Limit Worksheet A for 2026

Line 13 is the cap that keeps the nonrefundable credit from exceeding your tax. The instructions send you to Credit Limit Worksheet A: it starts with the amount from Form 1040 line 18, subtracts the sum of the Schedule 3 amounts on lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 6d, 6f, 6l and 6m, and then subtracts the amount from Credit Limit Worksheet B if you have to complete it. Schedule 3, line 5b is gone from the 2026 list, and the draft 2026 Schedule 3 marks that line “Reserved for future use.” On the 2025 Schedule 3, it was the energy efficient home improvement credit from Form 5695, line 32, and the draft 2026 Form 5695 instructions say you can’t claim that credit “for expenditures or property placed in service after December 31, 2025,” as our Form 5695 2026 guide explains. The result goes on Schedule 8812, line 13.

You complete Credit Limit Worksheet B only if you claim at least one of the mortgage interest credit (Form 8396), the adoption credit (Form 8839), the residential clean energy credit (Form 5695) or the District of Columbia first-time homebuyer credit (Form 8859), are not filing Form 2555, and have more than zero on line 4 of Schedule 8812. The 2025 instructions tied the clean energy condition to “Form 5695, Part I”; the 2026 draft says only “Form 5695.” The 2026 instructions are still a draft.

Who can receive the refundable part

The one new substantive paragraph in the 2026 draft instructions sits right after the income thresholds: “Limits on the refund of the ACTC. To receive a refund of the ACTC, you must be a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or qualified alien. See the instructions for Schedule 3-A (Form 1040).” The 2025 instructions had no such paragraph. The draft 2026 Form 1040 shows the other end of it: line 32c subtracts line 32b, “Amount from Schedule 3-A,” from line 32a, which adds lines 27a (the earned income credit), 28 (the ACTC), 29, 30 and 31. The line 28 checkbox that let a filer decline the ACTC on the 2025 return is not on the draft 2026 line 28. The rule behind Schedule 3-A, REG-119882-25, is still a proposed rule as of this writing; our Schedule 3-A guide covers what it would change.

Four households, worked through

Numbers land differently depending on a family’s income and tax liability, so it helps to walk through a few. A married couple with two qualifying children, enough tax liability to absorb the full nonrefundable credit, and modified adjusted gross income under the $400,000 threshold, claims the full amount in both years: $4,400 for tax year 2026, stepping up to $4,600 for tax year 2027.

Raise that same couple’s modified adjusted gross income to $430,000, and the phase-out enters the picture. That’s $30,000 over the $400,000 threshold, and at $50 for every $1,000 of excess, the reduction is $1,500 in both years — because the threshold and the phase-out rate don’t move between 2026 and 2027, only the starting credit does. The couple’s credit falls to $2,900 for tax year 2026 and $3,100 for tax year 2027.

A single parent with two qualifying children and $12,000 in earned income, but no income tax liability to offset — say, because total income falls below the standard deduction — depends entirely on the refundable side. Fifteen percent of earned income above the $2,500 floor is 15% of $9,500, or $1,425. That’s well under either year’s per-child refundable cap — $3,400 for two children in 2026, $3,600 in 2027 — so the 15% earned-income formula is what actually limits this family, not the per-child dollar cap, and the number comes out to the same $1,425 in both years. The inflation adjustment doesn’t move it at all, because this household was never bumping against the ceiling the adjustment raises.

Where the per-child cap does bind is a single parent with one qualifying child, no income tax liability, and $20,000 in earned income — a higher earned-income figure that pushes the 15% formula past the per-child ceiling instead of staying under it. Fifteen percent of $20,000 minus the $2,500 floor is 15% of $17,500, or $2,625 — more than either year’s per-child refundable maximum. That family’s refundable credit is capped at $1,700 for tax year 2026 and $1,800 for tax year 2027, an actual $100 increase this family would feel directly. The distinction matters: the inflation adjustment to the refundable amount only helps households whose refundable credit is limited by the per-child dollar cap, not households whose refundable credit is limited by the 15%-of-earned-income formula instead.

What came next

The IRS confirmed the tax year 2026 figures in Revenue Procedure 2025-32 and the tax year 2027 figures in Revenue Procedure 2026-35, section 3.05, released November 5, 2026. Watch this site’s IRS 2027 inflation adjustments tracker for the rest of the figures that moved on the same schedule, and see what changed on the 2026 draft Form 1040 for how the adjusted gross income figure that feeds line 1 of Schedule 8812 gets there in the first place. Families weighing a new Trump account election under Form 4547 should note that account is a separate savings vehicle, not a substitute for or an addition to the child tax credit itself. The same goes for the new $1,700 federal scholarship tax credit that starts in 2027: it is applied only after the child tax credit, so a family whose child tax credit already erases its income tax gets nothing from it that year and has to carry it forward (how the scholarship credit works under the proposed rules). And two figures that feed directly into this calculation are worth their own explanations: modified adjusted gross income, which determines whether the phase-out applies at all, and the mechanics of Form W-4 withholding, which is where most families first see the child tax credit’s effect show up, months before any return gets filed.

Divorced or separated parents should note that this credit can move between them. Form 8332 lets a custodial parent release the child tax credit to the other parent, but head of household status and the earned income credit do not move with it.

Sources

• 26 U.S.C. § 24 — law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/24
• 26 U.S.C. § 1(f)(3) — law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/1
• Rev. Proc. 2026-35, § 3.05 (tax year 2027 child tax credit figures) — irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-26-35.pdf
• IRS news release IR-2026-133, November 5, 2026 — irs.gov/newsroom/irs-releases-tax-inflation-adjustments-for-tax-year-2027-taxpayers-continue-to-benefit-from-the-working-families-tax-cuts
• Rev. Proc. 2025-32, §§ 3.03 and 4.05 (tax year 2026 child tax credit figures) — irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-25-32.pdf
• 2026 Schedule 8812 (final, “Created 8/18/26”) — irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040s8.pdf
• 2025 Schedule 8812, for comparison — irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040s8—2025.pdf
• 2026 draft Form 1040 — irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/f1040—dft.pdf
• 2026 draft Schedule 2 — irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/f1040s2—dft.pdf
• 2026 draft Schedule 8812 instructions — irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/i1040s8—dft.pdf
• 2025 Schedule 8812 instructions, for comparison — irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/i1040s8—2025.pdf
• 2025 Form 1040 — irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040—2025.pdf
• 2025 Schedule 2 — irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040s2—2025.pdf
• 2025 Schedule 3 — irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040s3—2025.pdf
• 2026 draft Schedule 3 — irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/f1040s3—dft.pdf
• 2026 draft Form 5695 instructions — irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/i5695—dft.pdf
• REG-119882-25, proposed rule, Federal Register, August 20, 2026 (FR Doc. 2026-16985) — federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/20/2026-16985
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Chained CPI-U series SUUR0000SA0 — api.bls.gov/publicAPI/v2/timeseries/data/
• finbarrow, IRS 2027 inflation adjustments tracker — companion page for the shared CPI window