Child Tax Credit Worksheets

If you have at least one dependent child who is age 16 or under at the end of the year, you may be eligible for a tax credit worth $1,000 for each qualifying child in 2012.

However, if your income is too high (over $110,000 for marrieds filing jointly, over $55,000 for marrieds filing separately, or over $75,000 for all other taxpayers), your credit may be phased down or out. On the other hand, if your tax bill is relatively low, you may not be able to make full use of the credit even if you're eligible for it. In some cases, taxpayers with three or more qualifying children will be able to claim a refundable credit, meaning that they get a larger tax refund than the amount of tax they paid through withholding this year.

The following worksheets can be used to compute the actual amount of your child tax credit.

child tax credit worksheets

The file is in Adobe portable document format (PDF), which requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is available, without charge, at the Adobe website.

For more information, see our discussion of claiming the credit.