The federal tax filing deadline falls on April 15, 2026 — just two weeks away — and for millions of unpaid family caregivers across the country, that date carries a particular weight. Many of them are quietly leaving hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars in refundable and non-refundable credits on the table each year, simply because no one ever told them they qualified.
When I sat down with Monique Washington at a diner near her home in East Baltimore on a Tuesday morning in late March, she had just come off a ten-hour overnight shift driving for UPS. She ordered coffee, black, and set her phone face-down on the table. She wanted to talk — had been thinking about this for a while, she said — but she didn’t want to seem like she was complaining.
That impulse to minimize her own situation turned out to be one of the most expensive habits of her adult life.
Eighteen Years of Absorbing Someone Else’s Crisis
Monique’s brother, Darnell, was 25 when he was struck by a driver who ran a red light in 2007. He sustained a traumatic brain injury and spinal damage that left him requiring daily assistance with mobility, medication management, and personal care. Darnell receives Social Security Disability Insurance — roughly $1,340 per month as of early 2026 — and is covered by Medicaid. On paper, those benefits sound like a safety net. In practice, Monique told me, they cover the floor but not much else.
“Medicaid pays for his home health aide four hours a day,” she said. “Four hours. He needs more than four hours. So I fill in the rest. I’ve always filled in the rest.”
When her parents died — her mother in 2014, her father two years later — there was no one else to step into that role. Monique was 31 when she became Darnell’s full legal guardian. She has held that role for nearly a decade without a break she’d describe as a real one.
Monique’s union wages at UPS place her in a stable income bracket — she earns approximately $78,000 annually, including overtime. By most measures, she looks fine on paper. But each month, she estimates she spends between $900 and $1,200 out-of-pocket on Darnell’s care: a second part-time aide who covers evenings, accessible transportation to medical appointments, specialized medical supplies, and the occasional adaptive equipment that Medicaid denies or delays for months.
“I don’t have a 401(k) contribution going right now. Haven’t for years,” she told me, matter-of-factly. “Something had to give. It was that.”
What the Tax Code Offers Caregivers — and Why Monique Didn’t Know
The IRS does provide mechanisms for family caregivers like Monique to recover some of these costs — but the eligibility rules are narrow enough that many people assume they don’t qualify without ever verifying that assumption.
The IRS Child and Dependent Care Credit applies not only to childcare but to expenses paid for the care of a dependent who is physically or mentally incapable of self-care — including a disabled adult sibling, provided that person qualifies as a tax dependent. That second condition is where things get complicated. Darnell receives SSDI, which means his gross income can affect whether Monique can claim him as a dependent under IRS rules.
In 2025 and 2026, the gross income threshold for claiming someone as a qualifying relative dependent is $5,050. Because Darnell’s SSDI benefit is approximately $1,340 per month — totaling over $16,000 annually — he technically exceeds that threshold. Monique had assumed this meant she was simply locked out of any dependent-related credits. She was partially right, but not entirely.
According to the IRS Publication 502, taxpayers may deduct unreimbursed medical and dental expenses for individuals they provide more than half of the financial support for — even if that individual cannot be claimed as a tax dependent due to income. This is a critical distinction. If Monique provides more than half of Darnell’s total support (which, between her out-of-pocket contributions and his own SSDI income, she likely does not in total dollar terms), she may qualify for a support test exemption. A tax professional reviewing Monique’s specific numbers could run those calculations definitively.
When I explained this to Monique, she was quiet for a moment. “Nobody ever told me there were different rules depending on which credit you’re going after,” she said. “I just assumed none of it applied to me.”
The Turning Point: A Letter From Her Union’s EAP
In February 2026, Monique’s union — Teamsters Local 570 — distributed information through its Employee Assistance Program about free tax preparation services available to members, specifically flagging caregiver-related credits. It was, she told me, the first time she’d seen the word “caregiver” in any official document connected to her finances.
She made an appointment with a volunteer tax preparer through the IRS’s VITA program — Volunteer Income Tax Assistance — which offers free preparation for individuals earning roughly $67,000 or less. Because Monique earns above that threshold, she didn’t qualify for VITA directly. But through her union’s EAP, she was connected to a pro bono tax attorney who agreed to review her last three years of returns.
What that review found wasn’t a windfall, but it wasn’t nothing, either.
What Three Years of Amended Returns Looked Like
The pro bono attorney identified that Monique had been eligible to deduct a portion of Darnell’s unreimbursed medical expenses on Schedule A for tax years 2022, 2023, and 2024 — not because she could claim him as a dependent, but because she had been paying those expenses on his behalf and could document them as exceeding the 7.5% AGI floor under a narrow support provision. The deductions were modest — not the thousands Monique had imagined — but the amended returns yielded an estimated combined refund of approximately $1,700 across three years.
“It’s not like I’m suddenly okay,” Monique told me plainly. “But it was money I left on the table. Twice over — once when I didn’t file for it, and once when I thought it didn’t exist.”
There were also expenses that didn’t qualify — the evening aide Monique hired independently, for instance, fell outside what the IRS considers a deductible medical expense, because that aide’s primary function was supervision and companionship rather than medical care. It was a distinction that frustrated Monique when the attorney explained it.
“The things that cost me the most are the things that don’t count,” she said. “The system rewards the parts that are easiest to document and ignores the rest.”
The ABLE Account: A Tool She Didn’t Know Existed
The most practically significant discovery from Monique’s review wasn’t about her own tax return at all. It was about Darnell’s eligibility for an ABLE account — a tax-advantaged savings vehicle created under the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act of 2014 for individuals whose disability began before age 26.
Because Darnell’s accident occurred when he was 25, he qualifies. Contributions to an ABLE account — from Monique, from Darnell himself using his SSDI income, or from other family members — grow tax-free and can be withdrawn tax-free for qualified disability expenses, including housing, transportation, healthcare, and personal support services. Critically, ABLE account balances up to $100,000 are also excluded from the asset limit that would otherwise affect Darnell’s SSI eligibility.
Darnell does not currently receive SSI — his SSDI benefit exceeds SSI’s income threshold — but the ABLE account structure could allow Monique to set aside money specifically for his care costs in a way that offers tax advantages she has never had access to before.
What Stays the Same — and What Doesn’t
I want to be careful not to frame Monique’s story as a resolution, because it isn’t one. She is still Darnell’s sole caregiver. She still works overnight shifts and comes home to check on him before she sleeps. She has not taken a vacation in six years — she told me this not bitterly but as a simple fact, the way someone might note that they haven’t been to a particular restaurant in a while.
She has not restarted her retirement contributions. She is not sure when, or if, that becomes possible. The $1,700 in amended refunds helped her replace Darnell’s wheelchair-accessible van battery, which had failed in January. That is where that money went.
“I don’t regret taking care of him,” she told me, toward the end of our conversation. “I want to be clear about that. But I do wish someone — at any point in the last eighteen years — had sat down with me and said, here’s what exists for people in your situation. Because I’ve been operating like I was completely on my own. And maybe I mostly am. But maybe not entirely.”
Monique filed her 2025 return in early March. For the first time in years, she had a tax professional review it before submission. The refund was modest. The sense that she now understood what she was entitled to — even if that amount was smaller than it should be — was something she described as harder to put a number on.
The April 15 deadline is close. For caregivers who have been managing the way Monique managed — paying forward, documenting nothing, claiming less than the law allows — there is still time, but not much of it.
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