How To Apply For Child Tax Credit

Hello, my name's Lea Healey and I'm the managing director of Income Max, the entitlement experts. We help people to make sense of and understand the benefits of tax credit system. Today, we're going to tell you lots about the benefits and tax credits that are available.

Now, if you've got dependent children or young adults and basically you'll know whether they are dependent children or young adults because you'll probably be getting child benefit for them, there's a good chance if you have sort of a low to medium income, you might qualify for a benefit called child tax credit. Now, child tax credit is designed to basically help you with the cost of children. It's different from child benefit which is a universal benefit and currently, everybody gets child benefit regardless of how much your income is.

Child tax credit is a little bit different because it means tested, and you actually have to apply for child tax credit. Now, how do you actually go about making claims to child tax credit? Basically, you need to give HM Revenues & Customs a call. They've got a helpline that you can actually call to kick-start your claim.

The number is 0845-300-3900. So once again that's 0845-300-3900. If you give that number a call, you can actually kick-start your claim to tax credits or child tax credit off.

You'll also be able to claim working tax credit at the same time as well. They'll send you out a form and obviously you'll need to actually complete that form and send it back to them. So once again, child tax credit is really for anybody who's got dependent children or young people.

So if you've got dependent children, it's well worth considering whether you'll be eligible for child tax credit and I think it's important to recognize that child tax credit's not just for working adults. Anybody can claim child tax credit regardless of their income. So perhaps you're a student or perhaps you're an income supporter, on job-seeker's allowance, or income related allowance, pension credit.

It really doesn't matter. Both working parents and also people on benefits, or students, or whatever, can claim child tax credit. The key issue is obviously having dependent children and then of course, whether your income is low enough to qualify.

So, if you want to try and find out whether you are eligible for child tax credit and also working tax credit as well, it's always worth seeking some advice. So have a chat to your local citizen's advice bureau, independent advice center or law center. And that's a quick guide to claiming child tax credit. .