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SummaryWorking families' tax credit (WFTC) was introduced in October 1999 to replace family credit (FC) as the main form of support for low-income working families with children. It aimed to help reduce child poverty both by attracting parents from previously workless families into the labour market and by directing additional support to those already working but living in families with a low income.WFTC was considerably more generous than FC: the credit amount was higher, there was more support for childcare and the rate of credit withdrawal was lower. Because WFTC was only available to families where someone was working, these changes would make it financially more attractive to have one adult in a family work 16 or more hours a week; we would therefore expect some parents in previously workless households to decide to work. Some low-income families with two workers, however, received a windfall gain from this reform, and we might expect that, in some of these families, one of the adults might decide that they no longer needed to work.This Briefing Note compares five recent studies that have examined the labour market impact of WFTC. There is a consensus that WFTC increased the proportion of lone mothers who work but seems to have had little effect overall on the proportion of adults in couples with children who work. If anything, WFTC increased the number of hours worked by adults in families with dependent children, largely because the reform was of particular help to those working fulltime. Overall, it seems likely that WFTC increased the employment rate, because the number of adults in previously workless families who moved into work probably outweighed the number of adults in previously two-worker families who decided not to work.