If you received financial assistance during the pandemic, you may not recall exactly how much money landed in your account or whether you received all three federal payments. The problem is that the tool many taxpayers relied on to check it, Get My Payment, is no longer available.
That doesn’t mean you’ve lost access to your history. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows you to view the amounts of the old stimulus checks from your online account. The key is to know where to look and to understand what you can do with that information in 2026.
How can you review how much money you received from the IRS?
The IRS confirms on its official Economic Impact Payments page that the three federal payments related to the pandemic have already been issued. To check the amounts recorded in your name, follow these steps:
The IRS notes that this account allows you to review the amounts corresponding to the first, second, and third payment. If you need to save the information, you can also download your available records.
Note: the Where’s My Refund? tool is not used to verify how much you received from the stimulus checks. It is designed to check the status of certain tax refunds, not the history of those payments.
What if you don’t remember receiving one of the checks?
Before drawing conclusions, review the documents you kept from those years. The IRS sent notices related to the payments, including Notice 1444 and Letter 6475, which informed about the third payment and certain additional payments.
If you filed a joint return with your partner, keep in mind that each spouse may need to check their own account to find the individual information. The IRS explains this procedure in its FAQs about the Recovery Rebate Credit of 2021.
If the record doesn’t match what you remember, gather your tax returns and the available documents before asking for help. This will allow you to compare concrete amounts rather than relying solely on memory.
Can you still claim a stimulus check that never arrived?
Here’s the detail that may change your expectations: checking an old payment does not mean you can request it again.
The Recovery Rebates credits allowed certain taxpayers to claim in their 2020 or 2021 tax returns stimulus amounts they had not received, provided they met the requirements. However, the general deadlines to claim those refunds have passed: the 2020 one ended in April 2024 and the 2021 one in April 2025.
The IRS also announced automatic payments for certain taxpayers who had not claimed the Recovery Credit for 2021. That measure does not represent a new open stimulus payments program.
Therefore, beware of pages promising to release an old payment in exchange for a fee or your banking data. To verify any information, use IRS.gov directly.
If you are looking for money that you can still receive, it is useful to distinguish between those pandemic checks and the current tax refunds or state aid available today. They are not the same, and confusing them can waste your time — or expose you to a scam — when you need clear answers about your money.
