Tax credit
tax incentive
A tax credit is a tax incentive which allows certain taxpayers to subtract the amount of the credit they have accrued from the total they owe the state. It may also be a credit granted in recognition of taxes already paid or a form of state "discount" applied in certain cases. Another way to think of a tax credit is as a rebate.
Refundable vs. non-refundable
A refundable tax credit is one which, if the credit exceeds the taxes due, the government pays back to the taxpayer the difference. In other words, it makes possible a negative tax liability. For example, if a taxpayer has an initial tax liability of $100 and applies a $300 tax credit, then the taxpayer ends with a liability of –$200 and the government refunds to the taxpayer that $200.
With a non-refundable tax credit, if the credit exceeds the taxes due then the taxpayer pays nothing but does not receive the difference. In this case, the taxpayer from the example would end with a tax liability of $0 (i.e. they could make use of only $100 of the $300 credit) and the government would not refund the taxpayer the $200 difference.
“Tax credit” enters the record as tax incentive. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what credit and incentive can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1062630. The Library of Congress control number is sh85132816. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tax credit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.