Believe it or not, the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation that President Biden signed into law back in early March is going to have ramifications that continue to be felt pretty much for the rest of this year.
If you caught our post from Friday along these lines, for example, then you know that something even better than a one-time, $1,400 stimulus check is coming soon. Starting in July, an expansion of the federal child tax credit made possible by Biden’s stimulus bill means families are going to start getting stimulus checks totaling as much as $3,600 over the course of a year for each eligible child. Those payments are a kind of stimulus check, even though they’re not styled as such. The actual stimulus checks that the law made possible were generally for $1,400, and while they represent the third and most likely last emergency direct payment to the American people of this kind as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the government is actually not finished pushing those payments out to everyone who’s eligible for one.
As you might imagine, it’s a daunting task involving a complex distribution scheme that requires identifying eligible recipients and then pushing out waves of payments as quickly as possible. Along those lines, the IRS says it just sent out a sixth batch of payments stemming from the $1.9 trillion relief bill, with those payments totaling nearly 2 million additional checks. This announcement, according to the tax agency, “brings the total disbursed so far to approximately 161 million payments, with a total value of more than $379 billion, since these payments began rolling out to Americans in batches as announced on March 12.”
The five previous batches of stimulus checks stemming from the relief bill were sent out in waves on April 2, April 9, March 12, March 19, and March 29. Among some of the fast facts to know about this latest round of $1,400 stimulus checks:
- The nearly 2 million checks in this new batch of payments are collectively valued at almost $3.4 billion.
- Nearly 700,000 payments, with a value of more than $1.3 billion, went to eligible individuals for whom the IRS previously did not have information in order to issue a stimulus check but who recently filed a federal tax return.
- This batch also includes additional ongoing supplemental payments for people who earlier this year received payments based on their 2019 tax returns but are eligible for a new or larger payment based on their recently processed 2020 tax returns. This batch included nearly 700,000 of these “plus-up” payments, with a value of nearly $1.2 billion, and we explained more about what these so-called plus-up payments are in this earlier post.
- Another 600,000 payments went to Social Security beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income recipients, including those with foreign addresses.
- Overall, this sixth batch of payments contains about 900,000 direct deposit payments, valued at $1.5 billion, and nearly 1.1 million paper check payments, valued at nearly $1.8 billion.
To see if you’ve got a new stimulus check on the way, check out the IRS’s “Get My Payment” tool.
