The $600 stimulus checks that were approved by Congress are on the way. If you haven’t yet received yours, you can now follow your check payment status by using the IRS’ Get My Payment tool, available in English and Spanish at IRS.gov. The tracker portal was activated late Monday afternoon. After asking you some basic identifying information, that tool should give you an idea of when your stimulus check will arrive.
“The IRS and the Treasury Department began issuing a second round of Economic Impact Payments, often referred to as stimulus payments, last week,” the IRS explained. “The direct deposit payments may take several days to post to individual accounts. Paper checks also began going out and will continue to be sent through January. Some people will be mailed debit cards in January, and the IRS urges people to check their mail carefully.”
According to the IRS, Get My Payment will let you confirm:
- That we sent your second Economic Impact payment, also known as a stimulus payment.
- That we sent your first payment. Some people received their first Economic Impact Payment in partial payments. If you received partial payments, the application will show only the most recent.
- Your payment type: direct deposit or mail.
Data is updated once per day overnight, so there’s no need to check more than once per day.
The IRS also asked that people not call about the second stimulus payment. Their phone assistors do not have additional information beyond what’s available here on IRS.gov and in the Get My Payment application.
There may be some glitches that delay the payments of the stimulus money and create confusion and questions for consumers. Some people who had their 2020 tax returns filed through tax preparers like H&R Block may have had their stimulus check sent directly to the tax firm, rather than their bank account.
Those same issues impacted the first stimulus check for some people who used tax prep services and for whom the IRS didn’t have direct deposit information. With the second round of stimulus checks, a similar issue may impact some people, with H&R Block warning its customers who used a service called a refund transfer that they might see “an account number you don’t recognize” on the “Get My Payment” website. Refund transfers are offered to allow people to tap their refund to pay their tax prep fees, according to H&R Block.
