Earned Income Credit for 2027

The IRS table tops out at $8,496 with three or more qualifying children, $4,573 with one, and $685 for a worker with none — against 2026 maximums of $8,231 and $664 at those two extremes. These are the amounts in section 3.06 of Rev. Proc. 2026-35, for returns filed in early 2028.

It depends on your family size and whether you file jointly. The highest cut-off is $72,512, for a married couple filing jointly with three or more qualifying children; the lowest is $20,164, for a single worker with no children. The full grid is in the table above. Both adjusted gross income and earned income are tested, and whichever is higher is the one that counts against the limit.

In three phases. It climbs at a fixed percentage of your earned income up to a ceiling — that ceiling is the "earned income amount", and hitting it is what produces the maximum credit. It then sits flat across a plateau. Past the threshold phase-out amount it falls away at another fixed percentage until it reaches zero. Only the dollar figures are inflation-adjusted each year; the percentages are written into the statute and never change.

A long-standing marriage-penalty fix, not a new change. Section 32(b)(2)(B) adds a separate indexed amount to the phase-out start for joint filers — worth $7,510 in 2027 — so a married couple can earn more before the credit begins to shrink. It predates recent legislation and is itself inflation-adjusted, which is why the gap between the joint and non-joint columns widens slightly every year.

$12,600, up from $12,200 in 2026. This is a cliff, not a taper: exceed it by a single dollar and the entire credit is lost regardless of how modest your wages are. It counts interest, dividends, capital gains and net rental or royalty income. Because it rounds down in $50 steps rather than to the nearest $10 like the rest of the table, it moves on its own schedule.

No. OBBBA reshaped the brackets, the standard deduction, the AMT phase-out and the estate exclusion, but it made no amendment to section 32 at all. The 2027 figures are plain inflation indexing under the existing statute, with no legislative reset to account for.

Yes. The IRS released them on November 5, 2026, alongside the other 2027 inflation adjustments. Before then this page carried its own projection from BLS price data, which ran a little low because it filled in the October 2025 index that BLS never published; with that month dropped, the same arithmetic gives exactly the IRS table, including the $8,496 three-child maximum.

On the 2027 return, filed from early 2028. Refunds that claim this credit sit under a statutory hold until mid-February, so the IRS normally starts releasing them in the second half of that month.