Let’s make sure we are talking about the right thing. The child tax credit is normally $2000, for 2021 it was temporarily increased to $3000 for children between the age of six and 17 and $3600 for children age 5 or under. Normally, the maximum child tax credit you can get is the amount of tax you owe. The additional child tax credit can give you a refund of the child tax credit even if you don’t owe income tax, but normally requires that you have income earned from working. The additional child tax credit is only calculated if you can’t use up the entire regular child tax credit against your other taxes. If you claim a qualifying dependent, TurboTax will always calculate the regular child tax credit and the additional child tax credit. There’s no way to turn it off or skip it.
You might be thinking of the advance child tax credit. This was only paid from July 2021 through December 2021 and was a partial payment against the full child tax credit which is calculated on your tax return. If you listed a qualifying child dependent on your tax return, TurboTax automatically calculated the amount of child tax credit you are entitled to, subtracted the amount you received in advance payments, and added the rest of the credit to your refund or subtracted it from the tax you owed.
The advanced credit ended at the end of 2021. No matter how you filed your tax return, you will not be getting further advanced credit payments in 2022. Any child tax credit that you qualify for now will be included with your 2022 tax return.
