Although tax law changes lowered the rates for five of seven tax brackets, your refund may not be as big as you expected because, proportionately, less income tax was taken out of your paychecks throughout the year. If you didn't update your W-4 for 2019 or 2018 (most people didn't), it’s highly possible this is why your refund isn’t as large as you expected. We've got some other possible reasons for a year-over-year refund decrease, see below.
The easiest way to determine what happened is to compare this year's return to the previous year's return. Also, double check your data entry to ensure all numbers from your tax documents were entered correctly.
Tip: If your refund is wildly off, you may have mistyped a dollar amount somewhere. An extra digit here, a missing number there, even a misplaced decimal point can have an eye-popping (but easily correctable) effect on your refund.
Video - Why did my refund go down compared to last year's?
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