The expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) included in the bipartisan Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act would help lift nearly half a million kids out of poverty next year and will benefit close to 16 million kids in the first year according to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The law would allow the amount of the credit which “phases-in” at lower income levels to be based on the number of children a family has, not just family income, and would expand the refundable portion of the credit. While this expansion does not go as far as the historic overhaul included in the American Rescue Plan, it represents an important step forward in the fight against child poverty and will give millions of families more economic breathing room.

The Democratic Staff of the Joint Economic Committee has prepared estimates of the number of children who would benefit from the CTC expansion in each Congressional District. These estimates were produced using state-level data provided by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. 

Estimates can be found for every state and Congressional District here.

Methodology

To calculate district-level estimates of the number of children who would benefit from the expanded Child Tax Credit, JEC Democratic staff started with estimates of the number of children who would benefit from the credit in each state produced by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities here.

For the state totals listed in each table, and for states with only one district, the tables above show the state estimates provided by CBPP. For states with more than one Congressional District, staff did a simple calculation to divide up these state-level estimates from CBPP to create district estimates. To do so, staff multiplied the state totals from CBPP by a fraction equal to the number of kids living in poverty in the district divided by the number of kids living in poverty in the relevant state. For example, to estimate the value for Alabama’s 1^st district, the calculation involved multiplying CBPP’s estimate for Alabama (280,000) by the AL-01’s number of kids in poverty (36,714) divided by Alabama’s total number of kids in poverty (240,009). After rounding to the nearest thousand, this equals the 43,000 value shown above.

The data on the number of kids in poverty are from the 1-year estimates of the number of people younger than 18 who are below the federal poverty line from the 2022 American Community Survey. Estimates are for Congressional District boundaries drawn for the 118^th Congress and were retrieved via the Census Bureau’s API. These proportions roughly match with the income and age eligibility criteria for the CTC and should serve as reasonable proxies for eligibility. These estimates should be treated as approximations that likely differ from the true number of beneficiaries in each district.