In mid-May, the Biden administration announced that the first of the Child Tax Credit checks would start to be sent out by Thursday, July 15. On that date, the IRS will begin to mail early payments of the newly increased tax rebate.

In an ordinary year, this would be a very unusual step to take; the IRS is primarily intended to be a collections agency, rather than a distributor of wealth like the Social Security Administration. However, 2020 was not an ordinary year. Amid lockdowns, job losses, and record-breaking unemployment, the government decided that the IRS was well-equipped to distribute stimulus checks to all Americans. It did so in three separate measures: the March 2020 CARES Act, the December 2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act, and the March 2021 American Rescue Plan Act.

The last of these three was most significant for the Child Tax Credit. It increased the credit from $2000 per year, its previous level, to between $3000 and $3600 per year, depending on the child’s age. The law established the upper-income limit for these payments at $150,000 per year for a family or $75,000 per year for a single parent.

More interestingly, the ARPA provided for a part of the Child Tax Credit to be sent out in monthly installments from July 2021 until December 2021, rather than as a lump sum to be collected while filing one’s taxes in April 2022. Though there will be an additional expense incurred with sending millions of checks to eligible families, the Biden administration’s logic was that giving the crisis, many American families could not afford to wait until next April to receive their money. Therefore, half of the payments will be made in advance – functioning as a quasi-stimulus check for U.S. families – while the other half will be combined into a more traditional tax rebated and collected in April.

In total, roughly 90 percent of families in the United States will be eligible for the payments. The government calculates that they will benefit more than 65 million children nationwide and lift 4.1 million of those children out of dire poverty. To receive the payments, all families are encouraged to file their most recent taxes – taxes which were due on May 17 – in order to make the IRS aware of any changes to each family’s status.

The increase in the Child Tax Credit is set to expire at the end of 2021, although the president has advocated for its extension until 2025 in a separate piece of legislation, the $1.9 trillion American Families Plan.

Trevor Filseth is a news reporter and writer at the National Interest.