The break room at a community hospital in Denver is not where most financial revelations happen. But when I sat down with Samantha Reeves, 31, between her second and third shift of the week, that’s exactly what she described — a moment in February when she realized the IRS owed her money she’d never thought to claim.
Samantha had been a registered nurse for six years. She’d done everything she was supposed to do: got the degree, took the loans, built a career. Then her ex-partner left two years ago, and the math stopped working.
A Salary That Looks Fine on Paper
Samantha Reeves earns roughly $72,000 a year before taxes — a number that sounds stable, even comfortable, until you map it against Denver’s cost of living. Her rent for a two-bedroom apartment runs $1,650 a month. Daycare for her four-year-old daughter, Lily, costs $1,400 a month. Her federal student loan balance sits at $38,000, and even on an income-driven repayment plan, the monthly bill is not trivial.
“On paper, people think I’m fine,” Samantha told me. “And I’m grateful I have a job with benefits. But after rent and daycare alone, I’ve already spent over three thousand dollars before I’ve bought a single bag of groceries.”
She picks up overtime shifts when she can, but the hospital limits how many hours nursing staff can log before mandatory rest periods kick in. Burnout, she told me, isn’t an abstract worry — it’s something she actively manages, because if she breaks down, there’s no one to cover for her at home.
The Credit She Didn’t Know About
The Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCTC) has existed in the federal tax code for decades. According to the IRS, working parents who pay for care so they can work or look for work may claim a percentage of up to $3,000 in qualifying expenses for one child — meaning a credit of up to $1,050 depending on income. For two or more children, the expense cap rises to $6,000.
Samantha had filed her own taxes using a free online tool for the past three years. She wasn’t hiding anything; she just didn’t know what she didn’t know. The credit requires filing IRS Form 2441, which many self-filers skip entirely if their software doesn’t prompt them correctly.
It was a coworker — another nurse who’d used a tax preparer for the first time that year — who mentioned the credit offhandedly in January. Samantha told me she went home that night and started pulling up her past returns.
Running the Numbers Backward
What Samantha found when she looked more carefully was that for the 2023 and 2024 tax years, she had paid well over $16,000 in qualifying daycare expenses and had claimed exactly zero dollars of the Child and Dependent Care Credit. She had also been under-claiming the Child Tax Credit, which for tax year 2024 allows up to $2,000 per qualifying child with a refundable portion of up to $1,700 for lower-to-middle income filers, per IRS guidance.
“I sat there for like an hour just staring at my laptop,” she told me. “I had done everything myself because I thought I couldn’t afford to pay someone to do my taxes. And the whole time I was leaving money sitting there.”
She reached out to a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site — a free IRS-sponsored program for filers earning roughly $67,000 or less annually. Because her income landed near that threshold, she wasn’t sure she’d qualify, but the VITA volunteer worked through her situation and confirmed she was eligible for help.
What the Process Actually Looked Like
Samantha described the VITA appointment as the first time anyone had walked her through her taxes line by line. The volunteer identified the Form 2441 she’d missed, confirmed her daycare provider’s taxpayer identification number was on file from her enrollment paperwork, and helped her understand how her income level affected the credit percentage.
The VITA volunteer also flagged that Samantha might be eligible to file an amended return for tax year 2023. That process takes longer — amended returns can take up to 20 weeks to process according to the IRS — and requires documentation Samantha is still pulling together. That outcome is not guaranteed.
“It’s not like this fixes everything,” she said, leveling with me. “I still owe thirty-eight thousand dollars in loans. Lily’s daycare is still $1,400 a month. But $2,700 back is almost two months of groceries and her co-pays combined. That’s not nothing.”
The Relief — and the Limits of It
I asked Samantha what she planned to do with the refund. She didn’t hesitate: a portion goes to her emergency fund, which had dropped to less than $400 after a car repair last fall. The rest would go toward the minimum on her highest-interest student loan.
What struck me most about Samantha’s situation wasn’t the dollar amount — though $2,700 is genuinely significant on her margins. It was how cleanly her story illustrates the gap between who tax credits are designed to help and who actually claims them. She is exactly the filer these credits were built for: single working parent, high care costs, moderate income stretched by an expensive city.
She’s also aware the Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account (FSA) through her hospital employer could let her set aside up to $5,000 pre-tax for care expenses in 2026 — money that would reduce her taxable income before the credit calculation even begins. She hadn’t enrolled in it during open enrollment last fall because she didn’t fully understand what it was.
“Next year I’m going back to VITA,” she told me. “I’m not doing it alone again.” There was no drama in how she said it — just the calm practicality of someone who has learned, at some cost, where the limits of going it alone actually sit.
I left that break room thinking about all the Samanthas — the people doing demanding, essential work, managing complicated lives on tight margins, filing their taxes in good faith, and leaving hundreds or thousands of dollars on the table simply because the system asks them to know things no one ever taught them. The credits exist. The money is real. But the distance between an eligible filer and a claimed credit is still, in 2026, surprisingly wide.
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