The law does not allow the IRS to process a return with Child Tax Credit until mid-February. If one was processed earlier there was some problem allowing that to happen. I have never waited more than a few days for my return to be processed and have been using TurboTax since 1993.
Almost all returns are processed within three weeks. Some forms or errors may need to be processed by a human and those can take a lot longer to process. It is almost always user error when a return is held up.
