Stimulus check calculator: how much would my HEROES Act payment be?

As the coronavirus pandemic began to hit the United States and the economy was forced into lockdown, the government and congress acted swiftly, passing the CARES Act, a $2.2-trillion relief bill passed on 27 March, to provide help to state and local governments hard hit by Covid-19, as well as businesses and individuals.

The main plank of the package to help hard-working individual Americans was a round of $1,200 stimulus checks (with further amounts payable for dependent children). In total some $267 billion has been sent out by way of these Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) to help Americans cope with the financial effects of a pandemic that has officially left the country in a recession, the National Bureau of Economic Research has confirmed.

Although unemployment actually fell slightly in May, a jobless rate of 13.3% nonetheless remains a whole 10% higher than it was in February, and several recent polls have shown that people across the US are clamoring for further financial support on top of the CARES Act EIPs, more commonly referred to as stimulus checks.

HEROES Act: up to $1,200 each, $1,200 per dependent

Heroes Act provisions

Like the CARES Act, individuals earning below $75,000 a year would be paid a one-off stimulus check of $1,200, while those on up to $99,000 would get a tapered amount. Married joint tax filers with a shared income below $150,000 would receive $2,400.

Whereas the first round of checks included an extra $500 per family for every dependent, the HEROES Act would raise this to $1,200 each (with a maximum of three), allowing households to claim a total of up to $6,000. What's more, unlike the CARES Act, dependents aged 17 or over would not be excluded.

Calculate how much your HEROES Act check would be:

Second Stimulus Check Calculator - HEROES Act

(Calculator created by Mateusz Tkaczyk and Jasmine J Mah)

HEROES Act faces opposition in GOP-controlled Senate

To become law, the HEROES Act requires to be approved by the Senate - but there it has met strong resistance from Republicans, who control the upper chamber. GOP leaders have slammed it as being DOD, "Dead on Arrival" in the Senate.

Senate-majority leader Mitch McConnell is wary of any further aid, and if he is pushed to provide further relief he is desperate to keep the total bill under $1 trillion. That said, President Donald Trump is beginning to make more encouraging noises over a second round of stimulus checks and looking at a $2 trillion package, which McConnell might have no option but to get behind.

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Senate Republicans may have turned their backs straight off the bat on the HEROES Act, but United States Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was far more open to the idea of a second round of stimulus checks, even if that will not be within the framwork of the Democrats' legislative offering. Mnuchin has gone so far as to say that a second round of stimulus checks is something the Trump administration is "seriously" contemplating.

"I think we're going to seriously look at whether we want to do more direct money to stimulate the economy," Mnuchin told a hearing by the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship on Wednesday. "I definitely think we are going to need another bipartisan legislation to put more money into the economy."


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