This month, the first advance payments of Minnesota’s new state Child Tax Credit (CTC) hit the bank accounts of families across the North Star state. Averaging $446, these bimonthly payments will deliver support to 35,000 children amidst high costs and forthcoming federal safety-net cuts.
As a pediatrician based in Minneapolis, and as Executive Director of Children’s HealthWatch, we have been caring and advocating for Minnesota’s youngest residents for more than 25 years. Every day, we see how policy decisions affect the health and wellbeing of children and families. Minnesota’s new CTC will help parents with the lowest incomes get the necessities their kids need to thrive.
The state’s CTC is unique. It is the largest in the country—up to $1,750 per qualifying child—and the only CTC with an advance payment option, through which families can receive a portion of next year’s tax credit in advance (paid out in August, October, and December of this year). Receiving these payments ahead of time, instead of as a lump sum during tax season, lets parents use the benefit to pay for expenses as they arise.
While unique at the state level, this isn’t the first time advance CTC payments have been implemented. At the national level, the CTC was temporarily expanded in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Congress made several temporary but meaningful changes to the federal CTC, including an advance distribution of a portion of the credit. Our recent research shows that parents who received the advance federal CTC in 2021 were less likely to experience anxiety, and their families were less likely to be food insecure, unstably housed, and late on rent payments compared to those who were eligible but didn’t receive the benefit. As a pediatrician, I often heard from families how the 2021 CTC advance payments helped parents afford children’s medications, eyeglasses, foods for special dietary needs, transportation, and sports participation fees.
Despite these documented advantages, Congress chose to not make the pandemic-era CTC permanent. But recognizing the benefits an advance CTC could have across Minnesota, in 2023, state lawmakers established a CTC that put over $545 million back into the pockets of more than 215,000 families to help pay for some of the costs of raising children.
And these CTC payments couldn’t come at a more urgent time. Under the recently passed federal tax and spending bill, 140,000 Minnesotans could lose health insurance and the 452,000 Minnesotans participating in SNAP could lose some or all of their benefit. The bill also strips the federal CTC from 22,600 US citizen children in Minnesota who live in mixed-status families.
In this time of cruel cuts to the programs so many across the state rely on, we take these first advance CTC payments as a heartening reminder of what is possible when we invest in and protect policies that put the health of children and their families first.