Treasury Will Auto-Enroll More Than 60 Million Kids in Trump Accounts, No Sign-Up Required

The Treasury Department will automatically open Trump Accounts for every eligible American child who doesn’t already have one, a change it estimates will put more than 60 million additional children into the program this year. Temporary regulations released on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, and scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on Sept. 30, scrap the requirement that a parent sign a child up before the account can exist.

Under the rules, on or about Oct. 1, 2026, Treasury will establish an account for each child under 18 with a Social Security number who has no account yet. No form, no app, no paperwork from the family is needed for the account to be opened.

From opt-in to everyone

Trump Accounts were created by the tax law President Trump signed in July 2025. Until now, a child only got one if a parent or guardian knew about the program and filed an election. At a mid-September hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said 7 million to 8 million American children had signed up so far. “Within a month we will have 70 million because we will go to auto-enroll,” he said, according to InvestmentNews.

The new regulations explain why the opt-in model was a problem. Treasury and the IRS wrote that the rules are expected to affect 73 million children in 44 million families. Citing Maine’s Alfond Grant program, which began offering $500 to every newborn in that state in 2013 and saw about 40 percent enrollment when parents had to check a box, the agencies concluded that if families had to act first, “ongoing enrollment would likely have been close to 50% of eligible families.” By contrast, “when the Secretary begins creating Trump accounts, nearly 100% of eligible children will have Trump accounts.”

The agencies also said that children in lower-income families stand to gain the most from automatic enrollment, pointing to early sign-up data broken down by income.

The reversal is notable. An earlier proposed version of these rules said it was not possible for Treasury to create accounts on families’ behalf because of legal and administrative constraints, including the need to protect taxpayer information. The new rules get around that by holding the auto-created accounts’ investments through a master group trust, while keeping separate records for each child.

Why donors wanted it

The change is designed in large part to unlock private money. The most prominent example is the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, which pledged $6.25 billion for children born between 2016 and 2024 who live in ZIP codes where household median income is below $150,000. The regulations say that “eligible donors prefer that their contributions reach all children, not just children whose parents have the awareness to opt in,” and that nonprofits and governments will be more likely to give “with the confidence that the Secretary creates Trump accounts for all eligible children.”

Under the new rules, charities and governments can make contributions to whole classes of children defined by birth year and geography, including gifts of publicly traded stock. Treasury projects that these class contributions will add up to “billions of dollars per year, allocated across the Trump accounts of tens of millions of children.”

What parents still need to do

Automatic enrollment opens the account. It does not finish the job. An auto-created account can receive government and charitable contributions on its own, but before a family can deposit its own money or receive employer contributions, a parent or guardian must claim the account by verifying identity and showing legal authority to act for the child.

The one-time $1,000 federal contribution is also not automatic. It applies to children born from 2025 through 2028, and a parent must separately make the election to receive it. Annual contributions are capped at $5,000, up to $2,500 of which can come from an employer tax-free, according to InvestmentNews. Until a child turns 18, the money must be invested in low-cost U.S. stock index funds. At 18, the account becomes available to its owner and works like a traditional individual retirement account.

The temporary rules run for three years, and a companion set of proposed rules is open for public comment for 60 days after publication.

A stake for every kid

For most of American history, owning a piece of the country’s companies has been something that happened to families that already had money, a broker and a parent who knew how the system worked. The whole point of Trump Accounts is to change that, and an opt-in program that half the eligible families would never find was going to leave behind exactly the children who most need a head start. Treasury’s own analysis said as much.

Now every eligible child gets an account whether or not the paperwork was ever filed, and every philanthropist who wants to give to the next generation has a pipe that reaches all of them.

Sixty million American kids are about to get a stake in their country’s future, and all it took was a government that stopped making their parents ask.

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