Modeling State Tax Rebate Payments in the 2022 CPS ASEC

More than twenty states issued special tax rebates in 2022. These payments were generally enabled or mandated by higher-than-expected state revenues and authorized for several purposes, including relief from high inflation and the ongoing pandemic. The U.S. Census Bureau accounted for the value of most of these state rebates in its estimates of post-tax income and poverty rates for 2022. This paper summarizes the features of these rebate payments, how the programs were modeled by Census's microsimulation tax program, and their impacts on official post-tax income estimates.