Tax Rebate Payments Start Making Their Way To Illinois Residents

ILLINOIS ­— Illinois residents began seeing rebate checks showing up in the mail or their bank accounts on Monday as part of a tax relief program from which the one-time payments will be made.

As part of the program Illinois residents will see a rebate of between $50 and $300, with the lowest amounts being paid to those who filed as being single on their taxes and the highest amounts being paid for residents who claim dependents on their taxes, the Illinois state comptroller’s website said.

The payments began going out Monday and are part of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Family Relief Plan. The rebates come from income and property tax relief payments and could take up to two months for residents to see show up, Comptroller Susanna Mendoza said.

“This $1.8 billion in tax relief is possible because Democrats balanced the budget, eliminated the bill backlog, funded schools, fixed roads – and through responsible financial decision-making — still found ourselves with a one-time surplus,” Gov. JB Pritzker said in a news release on Monday. “There are those who might have sent those funds straight back into the pockets of the 1 percent and big corporations instead of to working families, but that’s not what good government does.”

Qualified recipients for the income tax rebates must have filed their taxes in 2021 and must have made less in adjusted gross income than $200,000 individually or $400,000 if residents filed jointly on their taxes, officials said. Residents must have also paid their property taxes on their personal property in 2021 and 2022.

For property tax rebates, residents must have made less in adjusted gross income than $500,000 if they filed jointly and less than $250,000 if filing as an individual.

Residents will receive $50 if they filed as an individual, $100 if they filed jointly, and can receive $100 per dependent, up to three, officials said.

“I’m very pleased to announce that we remain on schedule and the first wave of tax rebate checks will be going out to taxpayers beginning today,” Mendoza said in the release on Monday. “My office will be working diligently to get these rebates into the hands of taxpayers. After all, it's your money.

Taxpayers who did not file their 2021 individual income tax returns but want to claim the individual income tax rebate (both the property tax and individual income tax rebates) or solely claim the property tax rebate are able to do so, state officials announced in July.

Rebates will be sent to residents automatically using the same method original refunds were transmitted if they were sent directly to residents by state officials. If residents used direct deposit, the individual rebate will be deposited directly into a taxpayer's account, the state said.

If there was no refund or a paper refund was issued, the rebate will be mailed to the address on file.

Mendoza said that more than $1 billion over the next 6-8 weeks to nearly 6 million Illinois taxpayers.