No, the stimulus does not affect your tax liability or refund at all. If you did not receive it, it would have been added to your refund, but the amount calculated for your refund has nothing to do with your stimulus payment. The change in your refund amount is caused by something else, not the stimulus checks you received.
Although tax law changes lowered the rates for five of seven tax brackets, you may owe income tax or your refund may not be as big as you expected because less income tax was taken out of your paychecks throughout the year. If you didn't update your W-4 for 2020 or 2019 (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 or why you may owe this year. Among the items below, a common occurrence in 2020 has been unemployment income. Many people who received unemployment either only had federal withholding applied to their payments or had no withholding at all. And since unemployment is taxable income at both the federal and state level, if the amount you received was large, it will cause you to owe income tax, either to the federal government, the state government or both.
Tip: If your refund or tax due 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.
Changes in your income or tax rate
State and local income tax deduction changes
Losing certain credits or deductions
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