Trump Account calculator

How this Trump Account (§530A) calculator works

Trump Accounts — formally section 530A accounts, created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 — opened for contributions on July 4, 2026. They're a new kind of custodial traditional IRA for children: anyone can contribute up to a combined $5,000 per year (indexed for inflation after 2027), with no earned-income requirement, and the money must sit in index funds tracking primarily U.S. companies until the year the child turns 18.

Every figure on this page is in future (nominal) dollars. There's no inflation adjustment: a balance shown at age 18 is denominated in the dollars of that future year, not today's. At 2.5% inflation, the default $85,656 at age 18 in 2043 is worth roughly $54,000 in 2026 purchasing power. Returns are also gross of fees — see the assumptions note under the chart.

This calculator models contributions from your child's first eligible year (2026 at the earliest) through December 31 of the year they turn 17 — the last year outside money can go in. It compounds annually at your chosen return, applies the one-time $1,000 federal seed for eligible children born 2025–2028, optionally adds the $250 Dell / Invest America contribution for eligible children born before 2025, and then lets the balance ride untouched to whatever age you choose. The two are mutually exclusive — see below. The default 7% return is a common long-run assumption for U.S. equities; it is not a prediction.

Why the result differs from a plain compound-interest calculator. Two structural reasons, both deliberate. First, contributions can't start before the program opened in 2026 — so a child born in 2025 gets only 17 contribution years before 18, not 18 (children born 2026 or later get the full 18). Second, this calculator deposits each contribution at the start of the calendar year, matching the incentive to contribute early; most generic calculators assume end-of-year deposits, and some compound monthly. At the defaults ($1,000 seed, $2,500/year, 7%, born 2025), this page shows about $85,700 at 18, while a generic 18-year end-of-year calculator shows about $88,400. Same compounding math — different assumptions about when the money arrives.

What is a §530A account, and why does it have two names?

If you searched for a 530A calculator rather than a Trump Account calculator, you're in the right place — they are the same thing, and you probably already know more about this than most people writing about it.

Section 530A is the provision of the Internal Revenue Code that creates these accounts. It was added by §70204 of P.L. 119-21 — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — signed July 4, 2025, along with §128 (the employer contribution exclusion) and §6434 (the $1,000 pilot program contribution). The IRS calls them Trump accounts in its own guidance, so both names are official; "§530A account" is simply the statutory one, and it's the term you'll see in Notice 2025-68, in the March 2026 proposed regulations, and on Form 4547.

The practical reason the distinction matters: a §530A account is a traditional IRA with special childhood rules bolted on, not a new category of savings account. Almost every misunderstanding on this page — the tax treatment, the age-18 question, the pro-rata rule, the withdrawal penalties — dissolves once you hold that in mind. The special rules apply during the growth period; after it, §408 takes over.

What this calculator assumes

• Two distinct periods, because the code treats them differently. The growth period runs from opening until December 31 of the year the beneficiary turns 17 — formally, it ends before January 1 of the calendar year they attain 18. The IRS worked example: born October 1 2025 → turns 18 on October 1 2043 → growth period ends December 31 2042. Contributions are capped, investments restricted, distributions almost entirely prohibited. After it ends, most special rules fall away.
• Contributions applied at the start of each year, with annual compounding. Year-end application runs lower — see the comparison above.
• A constant annual return, not a simulated sequence. This is a real simplification and it matters more here than in most calculators — see the forced-equity section below.
• Nominal dollars, gross of fees. No inflation adjustment; the 0.10% fee ceiling is not deducted (it would trim roughly 1% off the ending balance).
• Balances are pre-tax. How much is actually kept depends entirely on which dollars went in — that's what the basis line on the chart tracks.

What it does not do: predict returns, model index tracking error, or handle state tax treatment.

What could a Trump Account actually be worth?

Every figure below is generated by this page's own engine at a 7% annual return, for a child born in 2025 (17 contribution years, 2026–2042) unless noted. Nominal dollars.

Compare rows 3 and 4 — this is the whole argument of this page. Both put $5,000 a year into the account. Both end at exactly $168,154. But the family-funded version is 49% taxable at withdrawal and the employer-funded version is 75% taxable, because employer contributions create no basis. Same balance, materially different money. Every calculator that reports only the headline number treats these two outcomes as identical. They are not.

Row 1 is worth sitting with too: the $1,000 federal seed, left completely alone for 17 years at 7%, becomes about $3,159 — and all of it is taxable, since the seed creates no basis. It is a real head start, but it is not the program.

The tax treatment nobody explains

Here is the detail that most coverage — and every other calculator — glosses over: a Trump Account is not a Roth. It's a traditional IRA with special childhood rules. That means the ending balance is really two different pools of money:

Tax-free basis. After-tax contributions from parents, grandparents, and other individuals come back out tax-free. If you contribute $2,500 a year from 2026 through the year your child turns 17, that's $42,500 of basis (17 years, for a 2025 baby) your child will never pay tax on again.

Taxable at withdrawal. Everything else — all investment earnings, the $1,000 federal pilot contribution, qualified general contributions from charities and governments, and pre-tax employer contributions — is taxed as ordinary income when withdrawn. None of those four create basis. And because the section 408 rules apply once the growth period ends, withdrawals before 59½ generally add the 10% additional tax under section 72(t) on top, unless an exception applies (qualified higher education expenses and a first-home purchase up to $10,000 are the notable ones).

Withdrawals are not basis-first. You cannot take out "just the contributions" tax-free the way you can with a Roth. Because §408(d)(2) applies — separately to the Trump Account, but it does apply — every distribution carries a proportional slice of basis and taxable amount, in the ratio of total basis to total account value. On the $2,500-a-year default, roughly half the age-18 balance is basis, so a withdrawal of any size is roughly half tax-free and half ordinary income. This calculator's conversion ladder models it that way; many don't.

There is no "start a business" exception — and you will see one claimed everywhere. A great deal of the coverage, including the official promotional material for the program, lists education, a first home, and starting a business as the penalty-free uses at 18. The first two are real section 72(t) exceptions that apply to any traditional IRA. The third does not exist anywhere in section 72(t), section 530A, or Notice 2025-68. Money pulled out at 22 to fund a startup is ordinary income plus 10%, the same as any other early IRA withdrawal.

That's why the gap between the two lines on the chart matters more than the headline number. The yellow tax-free basis line is the money your child can always take out tax-free; the blue total balance line is everything in the account; and the shaded area between them is the portion the IRS taxes at withdrawal. Over long horizons, compounding means that shaded gap dominates: hold the account to retirement age and 80–90% of the balance may be earnings taxed at your child's future ordinary rate. The headline projections you've seen in the news — six or seven figures by retirement — are pre-tax numbers.

Contribution rules worth knowing

The $5,000 cap is shared. Family and employer contributions count against the same combined limit. An employer can put in up to $2,500 per year (pre-tax, excluded from the employee's wages), but that leaves only $2,500 of room for family money that year. The $2,500 is not additive to the $5,000 — it is nested inside it.

The employer $2,500 is per employee, not per child. This one catches larger families. If you have three children with Trump Accounts, your employer's program can contribute $2,500 in total across all three — not $2,500 each. The IRS states it directly: the annual limit "is per employee and not per dependent of the employee." This calculator models a single child, so enter your employer's contribution to that child's account, not the whole program benefit.

Excess contributions. Contributions above the cap have to come back out; section 530A(d)(5) treats a distribution of excess contributions as one of the few withdrawals permitted during the growth period, and trustees are expected to refuse contributions that would breach the cap in the first place. The 6%-per-year excise that applies to excess IRA contributions under section 4973 is the obvious analogy, but note that Notice 2025-68 does not actually state a 6% figure for Trump Accounts — treat the exact penalty mechanics as unsettled until the regulations are final.

Free money sits outside the cap. The $1,000 federal pilot contribution and qualified general contributions — the technical term for money from states, local and tribal governments, the federal government, or 501(c)(3) charities — do not count against the $5,000 limit, and they land in the taxable pool at withdrawal, since nobody paid tax on them going in. Qualified rollover contributions are also outside the cap and carry their existing basis across.

Calendar-year deadline, and no prior-year trick. Unlike a regular IRA, you cannot make a 2026 contribution in April 2027 and have it count for 2026. The IRS was asked this directly and said no — a contribution counts for the year it is actually made. Nothing could be contributed before July 4, 2026 at all.

There's a deadline to open the account, too. The election to open an initial Trump Account must be made on or before December 31 of the calendar year the child turns 17 — the same boundary that ends the growth period. It's made on IRS Form 4547, either alongside your tax return or through the online form at trumpaccounts.gov. Where no pilot-contribution election is being made at the same time, the proposed regulations set an order for who may make it: legal guardian, then parent, then adult sibling, then grandparent.

Nothing comes out before 18. During the growth period the only permitted distributions are qualified rollovers to another Trump Account, qualified ABLE rollovers, removal of excess contributions, and distribution on the death of the child. There is no hardship access, no loan, no early withdrawal at a penalty. It is a genuine lockup, which is unusual among children's accounts and worth weighing before you fund one heavily.

Contributions are probably gifts. Individual contributions are generally treated as gifts for federal gift-tax purposes under ordinary gift-tax principles, which matters mostly for grandparents doing larger multi-account giving. Note that this is general gift-tax law rather than anything section 530A or the IRS guidance says — Notice 2025-68 doesn't address gift tax at all.

Why can't you shift to safer investments as the child gets close to 18?

This is the structural problem with Trump Accounts that almost nobody writes about, and it follows directly from the investment rules.

During the growth period, funds may be held only in eligible investments: mutual funds or ETFs tracking a qualified index, no leverage, total annual fees and expenses under 0.10%. A qualified index means the S&P 500 or a comparable index of primarily U.S. companies — not industry or sector-specific, and the IRS treats ESG indexes as sector-specific. Money market funds and cash are not eligible investments, except transitionally while a contribution or dividend is being invested.

Read that as a portfolio constraint and the consequence is stark: a Trump Account is locked at essentially 100% U.S. equities for the entire growth period — including the final years before the money becomes accessible.

Every comparable vehicle lets you de-risk on approach. A 529 has age-based glidepaths that shift toward bonds as college nears. A custodial brokerage can hold anything you like. A Trump Account cannot hold bonds, cash, a target-date fund, or anything else that reduces volatility near the end of the runway.

So consider the shape of the risk: a family contributes the maximum for seventeen years, and a 2008-style drawdown arrives in the year the child turns 17. There is no permitted hedge, no glidepath, and no way to take money off the table — distributions are prohibited during the growth period. The ending balance is simply whatever the market says that December. A 35% drawdown in the final year of the $5,000-a-year scenario above takes $168,154 down to roughly $109,000, and the law offers no mechanism to have avoided it.

Two partial mitigations exist and both are narrow. A qualified rollover to another Trump Account carries identical investment restrictions — it changes the trustee, not the risk. A qualified ABLE rollover is available only to a beneficiary with a qualifying disability, and only in a single calendar year (see the edge cases below).

After the growth period the restrictions lift entirely. The constraint is specific to accumulation — which is precisely when it does the most damage.

The $250 Dell contribution — who actually gets it, and one unresolved question

Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion to put $250 into 25 million children's Trump Accounts. Two things about it are widely misreported, and one is genuinely unsettled.

It is not the same money as the federal seed, and no child gets both. The $1,000 federal pilot contribution goes to children born after December 31, 2024. The $250 goes to children born before January 1, 2025 who are roughly age 10 and under. Those two groups do not overlap at all. If your child qualifies for one, they are automatically disqualified from the other. This calculator now enforces that; plenty of coverage adds the two together.

It's also first-come, and it's not the Dell Foundation. The gift is capped at the first 25 million activated accounts, so it behaves like a queue rather than an entitlement. And it is administered through the Invest America Charitable Foundation, a 501(c)(3) — not the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, which is a separate organisation. Eligibility also depends on your ZIP code; the official checker is at investamerica.org/dell.

The unresolved part, stated plainly. For charitable money to sit outside the $5,000 cap it has to be a qualified general contribution, and section 530A(f)(3)(A) allows only three ways to define who receives one: all beneficiaries in the growth period, those living in specified states or a Treasury-designated "qualified geographic area", or those born in specified calendar years. The IRS has said flatly that no additional eligibility criteria may be imposed, and separately that Treasury will not designate any qualified geographic area during the initial rollout. A screen based on ZIP-code median income doesn't obviously fit any of the three. Invest America's position is that ZIP-code and age criteria are lawful proxies reaching at least 5,000 children at a time. That may be resolved in the final regulations, or the program may be restructured. Why it matters to your numbers: if the $250 turns out not to be a qualified general contribution, it would instead be a contribution "from other sources" — which means it would count against the $5,000 annual cap and create basis, making it tax-free at withdrawal rather than taxable. This calculator currently models it the other way (outside the cap, inside the taxable pool), because that is how the program is being presented. At $250 the dollar stakes are small; the point is that nobody should present this as settled.

The age-18 Roth conversion play — and the kiddie tax trap

Once the growth period ends — January 1 of the year your child turns 18 — the section 408 traditional-IRA rules generally apply, and with them a powerful feature: the account can be converted to a Roth IRA, in whole or in slices. The taxable portion converted (earnings, the federal seed, employer money) counts as ordinary income in the year of conversion; the after-tax basis converts tax-free. Once inside the Roth, all future growth is tax-free forever.

One correction worth making, because almost everyone gets it wrong: the account does not automatically turn into an ordinary traditional IRA at 18. The IRS is explicit that "a Trump account does not automatically cease to be a Trump account." It stays a Trump Account, and the section 408 rules simply start applying to it. A trustee's account agreement may provide for an automatic transfer into a regular traditional IRA right after the growth period, and many probably will — but that's a term of your specific account, not a feature of the law. Ask your trustee rather than assuming.

The reason to do this young is bracket arbitrage. An 18-to-23-year-old in college or early career sits in the 0%, 10%, or 12% bracket — likely the lowest tax rates of their entire life. Converting then means paying tax on today's modest taxable portion at a low rate, instead of paying ordinary income tax decades later on a vastly larger sum. At the defaults, roughly $43,000 of the age-18 balance is taxable; convert it across a few low-income years at 10–12% and the lifetime tax bill can shrink dramatically compared with withdrawing hundreds of thousands of taxable dollars at retirement rates.

The trap is the kiddie tax. Conversion income is unearned income, and the kiddie tax applies not just to minors but to 18-year-olds whose earned income doesn't cover more than half their own support — and to full-time students up to age 23 in the same position. Above a small threshold (the first $2,700 of unearned income in 2026 — $1,350 tax-free, the next $1,350 at the child's own rate — indexed annually), the child's unearned income is taxed at the parents' marginal rate, which erases the whole point of converting early.

The playbook, then: either wait until the kiddie tax no longer applies (typically age 24 for full-time students, or as soon as your child's earned income exceeds half their support), or convert in small annual slices that stay under the kiddie-tax threshold during the college years, then convert the rest in low-income years afterward. A new graduate's gap between finishing school and their first big salary is often the single best conversion window. This is exactly the kind of move worth confirming with a CPA — state taxes and financial-aid effects (conversion income counts on the FAFSA) can change the answer.

The pro-rata rule does not reach across to a Trump Account

This is the most useful piece of the guidance almost nobody has picked up, and it runs in the taxpayer's favour. Normally, if you hold several traditional IRAs, the pro-rata rule in section 408(d)(2) treats them as one pot: you can't cherry-pick the after-tax dollars out of one account and convert only those. Anyone who has done a backdoor Roth while holding a pre-tax rollover IRA knows the pain.

Trump Accounts are carved out of that. Section 530A(h)(4) says the section 408(d)(2) aggregation rule "must be applied separately with respect to Trump accounts and other individual retirement arrangements," and the IRS confirms that a Trump Account is "disregarded for purposes of determining the portion of a distribution from a traditional individual retirement arrangement that is not a Trump account that is allocated to basis."

In plain terms: your child's Trump Account and any other traditional IRA they own live in two separate buckets. Basis in one does not dilute or get diluted by the other. A young adult can run a backdoor Roth through a personal IRA without the Trump Account's basis muddying the calculation, and can convert Trump Account dollars without dragging in the rest of their retirement money. If you have read elsewhere that pro-rata across all IRAs complicates the age-18 conversion play, that is wrong.

Edge cases worth knowing before you fund one

The ABLE rollover window is exactly one year wide. A qualified ABLE rollover — a trustee-to-trustee transfer of the entire balance, for a beneficiary with a qualifying disability — can only be made during the calendar year the beneficiary turns 17. Not earlier. And after the growth period ends, a Trump Account cannot be rolled into an ABLE account at all. Miss that single calendar year and the option closes permanently.

Death during the growth period is treated harshly. If the beneficiary dies before the growth period ends, the account ceases to be both a Trump Account and an IRA as of the date of death, and the fair market value reduced by basis is includible in the gross income of whoever acquires the interest. Immediately — no inherited-IRA treatment, no ten-year stretch. If death occurs after the growth period, ordinary inherited-IRA rules apply instead. This is materially worse than a 529 or a custodial account, and it belongs in any honest comparison.

Basis restricts where the money can go later. If the account holds basis — and it will, if family contributed — it cannot be rolled into an employer plan such as a 401(k). It can still be rolled or transferred to another individual retirement arrangement.

It doesn't consume the child's regular IRA limit. Contributions to a Trump Account during the growth period aren't counted against other IRA limits. A teenager with earned income can fund both a Trump Account and their own Roth IRA in the same year.

An account can't be converted into a Trump Account after the fact. It has to be designated as one at establishment, and a beneficiary can have only one funded Trump Account at a time.

Unresolved: does the kiddie tax reach a distribution taken right after 18? A distribution from a traditional IRA is unearned income, and §1(g) can tax a dependent student's unearned income at the parents' marginal rate through age 23. Notice 2025-68 doesn't address the interaction at all. There is a plausible reading that §1(g) reaches these distributions — but that is inference, not guidance. It matters because it would blunt the age-18 conversion play that this calculator models, and it is the load-bearing assumption under any Trump-Account-versus-custodial comparison. Treat it as open until the final regulations say otherwise.

Trump Account vs. 529 vs. custodial Roth IRA

The honest ranking for most families: free money first, tax-free growth second. If your child qualifies for the federal seed or your employer contributes, open the Trump Account and capture those dollars — they're a guaranteed, instant return. Beyond the free money, a 529 (for education goals) or a custodial Roth (if your child has legitimate earned income) offers strictly better tax treatment on earnings, because tax-free beats tax-deferred-then-ordinary-income over almost any horizon. And once the account holder turns 18 and has earned income, new retirement savings belong in their own IRA rather than the Trump Account (contributions here stop at 18) — weigh the two tax treatments with the Roth vs. Traditional IRA calculator. Model the phases of a longer plan with the multi-phase compound interest calculator.

Frequently asked questions

This calculator is for education, not tax or investment advice. Confirm specifics with a CPA before acting.

Sources and status of the guidance. The rules on this page come from IRC §530A, §128 and §6434 (added by §70204 of P.L. 119-21, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, July 4, 2025); IRS Notice 2025-68, which is a notice of intent to issue regulations; and the proposed regulations REG-117270-25 and REG-117002-25, published March 9, 2026. Nothing here is final. Treasury intends to publish final regulations within 18 months of enactment, and details can change before then — the treatment of the $250 charitable contribution above is one live example. Page last checked against these sources on July 26, 2026.