Eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit on your 2025 return is as follows:

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a tax credit for low- to moderate-income workers that increases with family size.

This is a fully refundable credit. This means that some filers can receive the full amount even though they owe zero taxes. For tax year 2025, the maximum deduction is worth up to $8,046 for filers with three or more qualifying children.

But about one in five eligible taxpayers doesn’t claim this “valuable” deduction, the IRS said in a January news release.

According to the IRS, about 23.5 million filers collectively received about $68.5 billion in EITC for their 2024 returns, with an average amount of $2,916.

“The eligibility requirements for the EITC are complex,” National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said in her 2026 legislative recommendation to Congress.

“As a result, millions of eligible taxpayers are unable to claim the EITC and others are claiming amounts to which they are not entitled,” she wrote.

Eligibility for the EITC is based on your income, tax status, and number of eligible children (if you have any). Adjusted gross income limits increase based on filing status and eligible children.

In 2025, a single filer with no children can earn up to $19,104, while the same filer with three or more eligible children could earn up to $61,555. The AGI limits are even higher for married couples filing together, from $26,214 with no children to $68,675 with three or more children.

Experts say many low-income earners don’t pay federal income taxes and therefore don’t benefit from non-refundable deductions that filers can take from their taxes.

But “the EITC provides them with this tax credit in the form of a refund,” Chris Cox, director of federal tax policy in the federal fiscal policy division of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNBC.

By law, the IRS must withhold refunds claiming the refundable portion of the child tax credit, known as the EITC or Additional Child Tax Credit or ACTC, until February 15th.

So far, the agency’s filing season statistical release, which includes average refund amounts, has not yet included millions of payments to the EITC and ACTC.

The IRS’s first release containing these payments will occur on Friday and should include data through February 20th. As a result, the average refund amount reported on February 27 is “expected to be even higher,” according to the IRS.

The EITC typically adjusts annually through the IRS’s annual inflation update. But the change wasn’t made by President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” said Cox of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“There was a huge opportunity in this bill last year to really increase the incomes of low-wage people,” she said. However, “these provisions were not included in the bill.”

President Trump’s bill, passed by the House of Representatives, included a provision to “avoid duplicate and other erroneous (EITC) claims” that could have required pre-certification for eligible children. However, the bill was blocked by senators. Experts say the provision could reduce errors, but make EITC claims more difficult.