Tax credits for required paid leave by small and midsize businesses: The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), signed into law on March 18, 2020, provides small and midsize employers refundable tax credits that reimburse them, dollar-for-dollar, for the cost of providing paid sick and family leave wages to their employees for leave related to COVID-19. If you like this list, be sure to sign up for the monthly Hometown Advantage newsletter for our latest reporting and research.Īs part of its COVID-19 response, Congress has created several small business relief programs since March 2020: For ideas about how civic leaders might use ARPA money, check out our report, Small Business’s Big Moment. While most are using it to make grants, a growing number are using some of their ARPA money in innovative ways to improve the overall environment for small business development and to help ensure equitable access to financial, technical, and marketing support. Many local and state governments are using portions of their American Rescue Plan Act money to support small, independently owned businesses. Many of these grant and no-interest, deferred-repayment programs were quickly exhausted, but we included them in this list as potential models for new programs. If you have updates on the status of any of the programs included here, please email. Programs that offered no-interest loans, with deferred loan repayment, were also in great demand, serving as bridges until federal aid was available. Grant programs were in greatest demand and were almost always depleted within hours or days. While we are no longer adding new programs to this list, it may serve as a useful resource for communities seeking to create or modify a program to provide continued support for small businesses. For ideas on how local leaders might use some of their American Rescue Plan Act money to support small business development, check out our report:ĭuring the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we compiled an ongoing list of grant and loan programs created to help small, locally owned businesses weather the pandemic.