Where Are Families Most at Risk of Missing Out on the Expanded Child Tax Credit?

The Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis published data on children who were on health insurance forms but not on tax returns. These data show the number of children in 2019 with a Social Security number who appeared on health insurance tax forms, including Medicaid, but not on a processed tax return in 2019 or 2020. These children are likely to be eligible for the child tax credit but unlikely to have received advance monthly payments of the expanded CTC that started in July. Further information on the Treasury’s data methodology can be found in the published data.

To compare jurisdictions, we present the Treasury data on number of children who are at risk of missing the credit in a given zip code as a share of total children reported for the state. Furthermore, the Treasury data include over 130,000 children (or 6 percent of all reported children in the data) in an “Other” category per state or territory rather than within a zip code. Likely reasons for this are that these children reside in zip codes where the tax information was suppressed for data privacy issues or their addresses were not reported or incorrectly reported.  

In the downloadable data, we present Treasury data on the number of children reported, the number of “policy holders,” and children in the Treasury data as a share of all children in the Treasury dataset reported in the state. We also include the total number of children in each zip code using the US Census Bureau’s 2015–2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates. The American Community Survey data are for ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and 98.6 percent of the 14,248 zip codes in the Treasury data find an exact ZIP Code Tabulation Area match in the American Community Survey data.

These data are not a comprehensive accounting of all children possibly missing expanded CTC payments. For example, children without health insurance are not in the Treasury data and families experiencing homelessness or first-time parents might not appear in the data. Some children, particularly in families with mixed citizenship statuses, might not have health insurance (even though they are eligible) because of “public charge” concerns. Also, we have learned from local governments that clusters of children in some zip codes with few residents are most likely children in foster care who provided an administrative building as their home address.

If you are working on this issue and know of other reasons why children might not appear in this dataset or why certain children would be reported in a zip code they do not reside in, please email us so we can update our information.