By LaToya B. Parker, PhD, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
Tax refund season has become relief season, and the 2026 tax filing season has ended, and the White House points to average refunds up 11 percent as proof that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, delivered for working families. For millions of Black families, that proof never hit their bank accounts.
Consider a Black single mother earning $15,000 a year, below the federal poverty line for a family of two. Under OBBBA, she cannot access the $200 Child Tax Credit increase because the earnings floor and partial refundability block her from the full credit, while a married couple earning $400,000 collects the full $2,200 per child automatically. Both households appear in the same “working families” talking points. The law treats them as the same. The math does not. In other words, a credit sold as an anti-poverty tool is most reliable for families earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and least reliable for those at or below the poverty line.
A Bipartisan Policy Center poll found that most families used their refunds on necessities like bills, food, and housing. For the families OBBBA’s design leaves behind, a refund is not a bonus. It is a lifeline.
OBBBA permanently raised the maximum Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $2,200 per child. For the families who need it most, the $200 increase delivers nothing. Families must still earn above $2,500 before the refundable portion kicks in, capped at $1,700 per child. Both restrictions remain unchanged. Congress had the opportunity to fix both and chose not to, denying millions of the lowest-income children, disproportionately Black and Brown, the full credit, while higher-income families collect the full amount.
The law also added a new barrier: at least one parent must now have a valid Social Security number to claim the credit, where previously only the qualifying child required one. The Tax Policy Center estimates that 500,000 children in mixed-status families will lose CTC access entirely, while an additional 1 million will see their benefit reduced to a $500 Other Dependent Credit. Together, up to 1.5 million children had their eligibility cut by a single provision in the same law that raised the headline credit by $200. Congress also dropped proposals to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, leaving it unchanged while locking in trillions in high-end tax cuts.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, once projected cuts to Medicaid and SNAP are taken into account, resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, while increasing for households in the middle and toward the top. Research confirms that 45 percent of Black children will not receive the full CTC under OBBBA, compared with roughly 22 percent of white children. 41 percent of CTC benefits flow to the richest fifth of families, while the bottom fifth receives virtually nothing.
That pattern is not random. Because Black households are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-income tiers and in the programs being cut, a so-called race-neutral design that shifts resources up the income scale predictably leaves Black children behind.
Black families filed their 2026 returns in the middle of an acute affordability crisis. Gallup finds a record 55 percent of Americans say their financial situation is getting worse, the fifth consecutive year a majority has said so. Inflation hit 3.3 percent in March 2026, nearly a full point above February. The headline unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, but Black unemployment stood at 7.1 percent, nearly double the white rate of 3.6 percent. When averages like these go unexamined, the racial inequities they contain stay hidden in plain sight. A refund that never arrives is not a minor inconvenience. For families already stretched thin, it is the difference between keeping the lights on and falling behind.
OBBBA compounded that failure. Nationally, SNAP participation fell by nearly 4.3 million people between January 2025 and January 2026, a drop analysts describe as the predictable result of new eligibility rules and time limits, not evidence that fewer families need help. In Maryland, an estimated 170,000 residents lost SNAP benefits following OBBBA’s July 2025 enactment, and the Maryland Food Bank estimates it would need to more than double its food distribution to fill that gap. Both instruments, SNAP and the Child Tax Credit, are failing the same families at the same time. That is a compounding policy failure.
The House-passed Farm Bill would embed those SNAP cuts in standing agricultural law, making reversal significantly harder. The Senate has not yet acted. That matters.
Congress can fix this. Make the CTC fully refundable regardless of earnings. Eliminate the $2,500 earnings floor: Congress put it there and can remove it. Strengthen the EITC and reject SNAP cuts before the Farm Bill makes them permanent. Demand race-disaggregated tax filing data. The IRS’s decision not to collect race and ethnicity on tax forms makes the racial distribution of benefit invisible, and invisibility serves the status quo. We cannot fix what we refuse to measure.
The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, which the House passed in 2024, would have delivered an average benefit of $880 to the lowest-income families with children, those earning less than $27,000, compared to zero under OBBBA. Congress chose a different road. Black families who filed in the 2026 tax season are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for a credit that actually reaches them. OBBBA’s failures do not simply fall short of relief. They deepen a Black affordability crisis that the 2026 tax season made impossible to ignore.
