Tools · October 8, 2026

Sketch a Trump Account before the first deposit

By Ryan Standley, Publisher / Authorized Officer, Record of Sale, LLC

Public Law 119-21 created a traditional IRA for a child. Deposits can start July 4, 2026. This page compounds a seed, a family deposit, and an employer deposit, and it labels every figure as an illustration.

A Trump Account is a traditional individual retirement account opened for a child. Congress created it in the 2025 reconciliation law, Public Law 119-21. Deposits can begin on July 4, 2026. The child is the beneficiary. An authorized adult opens the account, or claims one the Treasury has already enrolled, while a special set of rules is in force. The IRS calls that stretch the growth period. It ends on December 31 of the year the child turns 17, the start of the year the child turns 18. This page compounds the numbers you set, once a year. It does not open an account, elect a credit, or tell you the deposit is a good idea.

The name on the statute is the name this page uses. That is a label, not a cheer and not a slur. Notice Nearby is a paid public-notice register. It is not the Treasury, not the IRS, and not a broker. The door for a real account is trumpaccounts.gov, the official app that site points to, and IRS Form 4547. The rules in the essay below are drawn from Congressional Research Service report R48910, updated June 15, 2026, from the IRS instructions for Form 4547, from the temporary regulations published in the Federal Register on September 30, 2026, and from the Treasury Department’s announcement on October 1, 2026 that automatic enrollment was complete. Where a later official paper changed an earlier description, the page says so. The arithmetic above is still only arithmetic.

The projector is filled in so you can check it. Birth year 2026, which is inside the pilot window, so the opening deposit starts at $1,000.00. Family contribution $1,200.00 a year, which is one hundred dollars a month. Employer contribution zero. No extra gift. Illustrated return 7 percent, held constant. That birth year has 18 deposit years in the picture, from 2026 through the year the child turns 17. On those knobs the balance at the end of the growth period is $47,034.70. Of that, $22,600.00 is money put in and $24,434.70 is illustrated growth. Leave the same pot alone, with no new deposits, and the picture reads $105,931.17 at the start of the year the child turns 30, and $779,552.18 about halfway through age 59. None of those figures is a quote from a fund company. They are the recurrence written out: add the deposit, then multiply by 1.07, and round to the cent.

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Hold the other knobs still and the three chips above restate a family deposit of $0, $250, and $5,000 a year. In this filled-in picture those land at $3,379.92, $12,474.65, and $185,274.77 at the end of the growth period. The $0 chip is the seed compounding by itself. The $250 chip is a round annual gift. The $5,000 chip is the 2026 combined cap, with no room left for an employer. Move the return, the birth year, or the extra gift and the chips move with you. They are not a leaderboard. They are the same formula wearing three coats. If you want the words under the knobs, keep reading. The sections are how the account works, who can get the $1,000, what counts toward the annual cap, what the projector is assuming, what changes at 18, and where the sentences came from.

How it works

A Trump Account is a traditional IRA with a set of rules that apply only during the growth period. After that, CRS reports that it follows ordinary traditional-IRA rules, with a memory: the IRS has said an account that starts this way keeps that identity, cannot later take SEP or SIMPLE contributions, and is not mixed with other IRAs when basis is sorted out. During the growth period anyone may put money in, and the deposit does not have to come from the child’s wages. An ordinary IRA generally cannot take more than the beneficiary earned. A child with no earnings can still have a Trump Account. The child must be a U.S. citizen with a work-authorized Social Security number, and the account has to be opened before the growth period is over. One child, one Trump Account.

Who may act for the child is narrower than any helpful adult. CRS describes the authorized individual as a legal guardian, parent, adult sibling, or grandparent. For the $1,000 pilot, the person who elects the credit has to be able to claim the child as a qualifying child. CRS, writing from the record as of June 15, 2026, said an authorized individual would open the account on Form 4547 and that Treasury did not then plan to create accounts itself. Temporary regulations published September 30, 2026, Federal Register document 2026-20026, provide for automatic enrollment. On October 1, 2026, Treasury announced that enrollment was complete and that a parent or guardian still has to claim the account in the official app before others can contribute and before the $1,000 seed is paid. An unclaimed account is not a funded account.

During the growth period the money has to sit in a narrow kind of investment. The statute, as CRS explains it, requires a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500 or another index of equity in primarily United States companies. The IRS has said it expects “primarily” to mean at least 90 percent of the index by weight, and the index has to be one with publicly traded regulated futures. Sector funds, single stocks, bonds, mostly foreign indexes, and leverage are out. Annual fees and expenses may not exceed 0.1 percent of the balance. The slider on this page is not a menu of those funds. It is one made-up growth rate, so you can see how sensitive the ending balance is. A real account will own whatever eligible fund the trustee offers.

Withdrawals during the growth period are generally forbidden. The exception CRS describes is a rollover into an ABLE account, and only in the year the beneficiary turns 17, the last year of the growth period. It has to be a direct trustee-to-trustee move of the whole account. A family cannot take a partial check, spend some, and roll the rest. ABLE accounts are a separate statute for people who are blind or disabled, with their own dollar limits and their own definition of a qualified expense. This page does not model an ABLE rollover. If that exception might matter in your house, the source is the statute and the IRS instructions, not a growth chart.

Who gets the $1,000

Public Law 119-21 created a one-time refundable credit of $1,000, paid into the child’s Trump Account rather than mailed to the parent. CRS states the eligibility in a short list. The child must be a U.S. citizen. The child must have a work-authorized Social Security number. The child must have been born on or after January 1, 2025, and on or before December 31, 2028. The credit is elected. It is not a prize that lands because a birth certificate exists. The person who elects it has to be able to claim the child as a qualifying child for dependency purposes: a son or daughter, stepchild, adopted child, eligible foster child, sibling, or a descendant of one of those, with the usual tests for support, residency, and the rest of the dependency rules. Treasury’s October 1 announcement adds the operational step that fits the temporary regulations: the account has to be claimed before the seed is paid. The Treasury has also said the pilot deposit will not be made before July 4, 2026.

The $1,000 does not count toward the annual contribution cap. That is why the projector treats the opening deposit as a one-time addition, not as part of the $5,000. It is pre-tax money in the IRA sense. CRS is plain that the pilot contribution is taxed when it comes out, the same way other tax-advantaged deposits are. It is not a gift you later withdraw tax-free. If you set the opening box to $1,000 for a birth year inside 2025 through 2028, you are sketching that pilot. If you type a different opening number, you have left the statute and started an illustration of your own. The callout above the chart keeps the eligibility answer separate from the number in the box, so a curious edit does not quietly rewrite the law.

A child born in 2024 or in 2029 does not get this credit, on the terms CRS states. The account itself is not limited to the pilot years. A citizen under 18 with a work-authorized Social Security number can still be the beneficiary of a Trump Account. The projector’s birth-year slider runs from 2009, the oldest year that still has a growth period after deposits begin, through 2032. Move it off 2025–2028 and the seed callout switches to no. The opening box drops to zero unless you have already typed your own figure. That zero is honest. It is not a judgment about the child. A family can still type an opening amount to see what a head start of their own money would look like. They should not tell the child the government is sending it.

The credit is refundable, and CRS notes that it is protected from offset for certain federal and state debts, including unpaid taxes, child support, and overpaid unemployment compensation. That is a statutory detail, not a promise that every eligible child has already been paid. Election, a claimed account, a trustee, and a Social Security number that the government can match all sit between the statute and a deposit. This page cannot see any of those. If the callout says yes, it means the birth year is inside the pilot window and nothing more.

Contribution rules

The combined annual cap for 2026 is $5,000. CRS says the cap is adjusted for inflation after 2027. This projector holds it flat, which will understate later room if the adjustment happens and will not invent an adjustment that has not been published. The cap is a combined cap. A parent who puts in $3,000 leaves $2,000 for a grandparent in that same year. If the two of them put in $6,000 between them, the excess is not a charming surplus. CRS describes an annual 6 percent penalty tax on the excess until it is removed. The sliders stop at the cap so the picture does not tutor that penalty. Real life will not stop your bank transfer for you.

Ordinary contributions from individuals are not deductible during the growth period, not for the child and not for the adult who wrote the check. That is easy to miss if you are used to a workplace 401(k). The tax benefit during these years is deferral. Dividends and gains inside the account are not taxed in the year they happen. They are taxed later, generally as ordinary income, when money comes out. Money that went in after tax — the family deposits — can come back out without being taxed a second time. The growth on those deposits cannot. The federal seed, an employer deposit, and a qualified general contribution go in pre-tax and are taxed on the way out. The big number on this page is a balance, not a spending-money figure. Income tax is still ahead of it.

An employer may contribute to a Trump Account of an employee or of the employee’s dependent. CRS puts the tax-free limit at $2,500 per employee per year, with an inflation adjustment after 2027, and the IRS has said it will read that limit as annual rather than lifetime. Unlike the federal seed, the employer deposit counts toward the $5,000. The projector enforces both limits at once. If you set the family slider at $4,000, the employer slider will not go past $1,000. If you set the family slider at $5,000, the employer slider sits at zero. The $2,500 is per employee, not a promise of $2,500 in each child’s account. A parent with two eligible children should not run this page twice and add the employer lines together unless the employer is actually splitting a single $2,500, or unless a plan document says something this page has not read. Employer deposits, when they qualify, are excluded from the employee’s income and are deductible by the employer as compensation. They can be offered through a cafeteria plan. They are taxed to the beneficiary when withdrawn.

Qualified general contributions are the third door, and they are the reason the extra-gift slider exists. A state, a locality, a tribal government, or a 501(c)(3) organization can fund deposits that do not count toward the $5,000, if the money is paid to the Treasury and then divided equally among a qualified class. CRS describes that class as all account holders who will not reach 18 by year-end, or all such children in a state or a Treasury-designated area of at least 5,000 beneficiaries, or all such children born in specified years. The gift cannot be aimed at one family, one school, or one income test written by the donor. CRS notes that some announced programs use the economics of a zip code as an indirect screen, and it describes commitments whose public arithmetic works out to $250 a child for a large defined group. The button marked “Illustrate $250” copies that figure so you can see the shape of a one-time extra. It does not look up a zip code. It is not a claim form. A philanthropic deposit that fails the qualified-class rules would count toward the $5,000 like any other gift. The slider does not police that distinction. It only shows what a one-time addition does to the compound curve.

Individual deposits can also be gifts for gift-tax purposes. CRS flags a wrinkle: the annual exclusion is generally for a present interest, and a contribution the child cannot withdraw during the growth period may be a future interest. This chart does not compute gift tax, and a large check is not a gift-tax return. The chart also leaves out the ordinary IRA contribution limit that applies after the growth period. During the years the sliders count, the child’s earned income is not the cap.

What the projector assumes

The recurrence is deliberate and a little generous. At the start of the first counted year, the opening deposit and any one-time extra are added. Those amounts do not reduce the $5,000. Then, each counted year, the family and employer deposits are added and the whole balance is multiplied by one plus the rate. A deposit earns a full year in the year it arrives. A December contribution would earn less. The full-year convention is here because you can redo one year on a napkin. It is not a trustee’s daily accrual. 2026 is counted as a full year even though the statute does not allow a deposit before July 4, so the first year in the picture includes months the law does not.

The first counted year is 2026, or the birth year if the child is born later. A deposit cannot precede the child or July 4, 2026. The last counted year is the year the child turns 17. A child born in 2026 is counted from 2026 through 2043. A child born in 2009 is counted once, in 2026. After that last growth year, the views out to 30 and to 59½ compound the balance with no new deposits. Twelve more full years is the figure labeled at 30, the start of the year the child turns 30, parallel to “at 18.” Forty-one and a half more years is the figure labeled at 59½. The half year is the square root of one plus the rate, applied once. New IRA contributions, withdrawals, a Roth conversion, fees, and a jagged market are not in the extension.

The rate starts at 7 percent because that is a round figure people reach for when they illustrate a long run of U.S. stocks. This page did not compute a historical average, and it is not saying the average will repeat. Lost decades exist, and so do runs better than the top of the slider. The slider stops at 4 and 10 percent so a person can compare a range, not because those ends are forecasts. Fees of up to 0.1 percent a year are allowed on an eligible fund and are not subtracted unless you nudge the slider. Inflation is not subtracted either. A balance at age 59 is a nominal balance. The $5,000 cap is frozen at the 2026 figure even if a later inflation adjustment raises it.

What happens at 18

When the growth period ends, the investment limit and the no-withdrawal rule end with it. The account is still a traditional IRA. Amounts contributed with after-tax dollars can come out without a second income tax. Pre-tax amounts — the seed, employer money, qualified general contributions — are ordinary income on the way out, and so are the earnings on every kind of contribution. Two accounts with the same balance can therefore owe different tax. The projector does not know your basis and does not file a return. The gold band and the blue band on the chart are not equally taxed.

Take money before age 59½ and the ordinary income tax can be joined by an additional 10 percent tax. The familiar exceptions still exist, and they are exceptions to that extra tax, not a magic erasure of income tax. CRS lists, among others, higher-education expenses, a first home up to $10,000, birth or adoption expenses up to $5,000, emergency personal expenses up to $1,000 in a year, certain medical expenses, health-insurance premiums while unemployed, disability, death, and a series of substantially equal periodic payments. The list in statute and in IRS Publication 590-B is longer and more conditional than a paragraph on a calculator page. A withdrawal that qualifies as an exception can still be partly or fully taxable. A withdrawal that feels like an emergency can still miss the exception. Nothing in the chart is permission to take the money.

This page will not rank the neighbors. A 529 plan is built for education expenses. A custodial Roth IRA needs the child to have earned income. A taxable brokerage account can hold almost anything and can use long-term capital-gains rates, while taxing dividends along the way. Which vehicle fits depends on earnings, tax rates, whether the money might be needed early, and whether an employer or a qualified general contribution is actually on offer. Those facts are not in the boxes. What the sliders are built to show is the growth-period shape of a Trump Account: deposits without earned income, a possible $1,000 seed, a possible employer exclusion, a hard investment list, and no withdrawal except the ABLE rollover. After 18 it is, mostly, a traditional IRA that remembers where it came from.

If you speak about the chart at a kitchen table, say the rate you assumed and say that tax is still outside the number. If you speak about it in public, say that Notice Nearby did not certify it. The register can carry a notice when someone pays to place one. A calculator does not place anything, does not satisfy a newspaper statute, and does not stand in for the disclosure a trustee will eventually send. The useful sentence is short. Deposits of this size, at this constant rate, for this many years, produce this balance before tax. Then go to trumpaccounts.gov if the next step is an actual account rather than a picture of one.

Sources

The official public site is trumpaccounts.gov. The Congressional Research Service overview is R48910, Trump Accounts: Overview and Policy Considerations, updated June 15, 2026. The temporary regulations are Federal Register document 2026-20026, effective September 30, 2026. The companion proposed rule is document 2026-20027. Proposed rules are not the same thing as temporary regulations. Where this page describes how an account is opened in October 2026, it is following the temporary regulations and the Treasury announcement, not the proposal and not the earlier CRS sentence about Treasury’s plans.

IRS instructions for Form 4547 explain the election to establish an initial account and the election for the pilot contribution, and they point back to trumpaccounts.gov for the online path. Treasury’s October 1, 2026 release, “Treasury Announces the Completion of Automatic Enrollment Today for Trump Accounts,” is the source for the claim-the-account step. Distribution exceptions are summarized from CRS and belong, in full, to IRS Publication 590-B. If a sentence here and a sentence on those pages ever disagree, the government page is the one to follow. This essay will not be updated in the night a new revenue procedure appears. The date under the headline is the date the sentences were written.

The projector is an educational illustration of compound growth. It is not a forecast, not your child’s account, and not a tax calculation. Ryan Standley wrote this page as Publisher / Authorized Officer of Notice Nearby. Notice Nearby is a paid public-notice register operated by Record of Sale, LLC, an Oregon limited liability company. This is an educational illustration. It is not a tax bill, not an appraisal, not a levy certification, not official debt math, and not legal, tax, or financial advice. Nothing here is Legal Publication, and a calculator does not satisfy a newspaper statute or any other notice statute.