Expanded Child Tax Credits: A Transformational Opportunity to Help Families Put Food on the Table

This work was originally published by scholars with the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. The institute integrated with Washington University’s Center for Social Development in January 2025.

The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) showed a clear path to dramatically cutting hunger and poverty — the central root cause of hunger — among households with children. These essential benefits for children and their families were lost when the CTC expired in December 2021. This brief provides key information anti-hunger and nutrition stakeholders need to know about the 2021 expanded CTC, its impact on households with children related to hunger, food spending, and poverty — including new state-level data — and opportunities to take action to make permanent an expanded and more inclusive CTC at the federal and state level.

Project: Child Tax Credit Expansion