You'll need to sign in or create an account to connect with an expert.
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
My refund was 1500 then I added the stimulus payment now my refund is 128. I thought this was not suppose to be calculate as income. Help
What you may not realize is that as soon as you began to prepare your tax return, the software was giving you the $1400 and it was shown on that "refund monitor" -----but when you entered that you received it already, the software had to reconcile the payment you received, You cannot get it twice---so it looked to you like you "lost" $1400. You did not lose it and were not taxed on it---you just cannot receive it twice.
Still have questions?
Make a postAsk questions and learn more about your taxes and finances.
jpw050
Level 2
Mike6465
Level 1
alexis-tunnell17
New Member
rykcade
New Member
Ramona20201
New Member
Did the information on this page answer your question?
You have clicked a link to a site outside of the TurboTax Community. By clicking "Continue", you will leave the Community and be taken to that site instead.