Trump Accounts enroll millions, but only 5% of the families they target

Seven million children have signed up for Trump Accounts, according to the White House and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and roughly 86 percent of them live in families earning less than $200,000; among low- and moderate-income households eligible for the same 530A account, a new study from the nonprofit Commonwealth puts the take-up at 5 percent. The survey of more than 1,000 eligible families finds that the accounts have reached awareness long before they have reached accounts.

Trump Accounts, designated 530A, can be opened for any child under 18, and the Treasury seeds $1,000 for every child born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028. The design puts a long-term investment account within reach of every family with a child; what it does not do is act on the family's behalf, because a parent has to open the account and that single choice carries the entire enrollment question.

More than half of eligible parents surveyed — 55 percent — knew the accounts existed, and awareness rose to 65 percent among parents whose children qualify for the $1,000 federal seed; even so, only 5 percent had opened one. Among eligible parents with children 10 and under, 38 percent said they intended to open an account and had not done so, and 36 percent were undecided.

The hesitation has a shape: eligible families are working through how the accounts interact with their taxes, whether a balance would affect their public benefits, and whether they trust the Trump administration to run the program. Two of those are policy questions only a rule can settle, and the third is a matter of experience the program has to earn.

Timothy Flacke, Commonwealth's CEO and co-founder, said the moment offers 'an opportunity to bring wealth building into the lives of millions of families who have historically had fewer opportunities to participate in capital markets.' His qualification followed: eligibility alone does not guarantee meaningful outcomes, and participation 'will not happen by accident.'

The messaging toolkit Commonwealth built in response assigns the enrollment problem to the corridor between a family and the institution that already has its attention, not to a federal office that has to find the family first; employers, financial services firms, community organizations, and other institutions are already in these households' lives, and the toolkit asks them to carry the last mile on their own initiative.

It is a reasonable place to look and a hard place to bet. The workplace retirement system is the closest available guide, and the lesson most of the industry drew from it is that participation climbs when the decision is taken out of the household's hands; a 530A account hands the decision back, which means the toolkit is doing the work that a default does elsewhere, and doing it with volunteers.

Signups will not decide whether this policy works. Persuasion is the tool in play, and persuasion is a weak instrument in a population with good reasons to be careful; a family weighing an account against a benefits cliff is running arithmetic no messaging campaign can finish. Commonwealth's toolkit answers the question of how to tell families about the accounts, while the question families are asking remains open.

The Treasury's 86 percent and Commonwealth's 5 percent count different populations — children who have signed up versus eligible low- and moderate-income households that have opened nothing — but placed side by side they trace the same curve, thick at the top of the eligible population and thin at the bottom. Because the $200,000 income line is so wide, a program can be majority-composed of families below it and still tilt toward the households already closest to the capital markets the accounts exist to open.

What closes a take-up gap this wide is either a mechanism that enrolls a household before it has to decide, or a rule that makes saving cost nothing at the margin. The first would require employers to act; the second would require the question of benefits treatment to be settled; neither sits in the design as described.

The figure that matters is 5 percent, and what moves it is an answer the survey says families still do not have. Employers and community groups can hand out Commonwealth's toolkit. Somebody, eventually, has to tell a parent on assistance what a 530A balance does to the check that already arrives.