Trump Accounts: where the money goes, and who gets paid

Every American child with a Social Security number now has a Trump Account. The money goes into one S&P 500 fund, so it isn't flowing into private companies. The private-sector winners are the three Wall Street firms paid to run the program, and the prize for them is customers, not fees.

~70Maccounts after auto-enrollment

$4.5B+deposited so far

0.006%of S&P 500 market value

0.02%yearly fee on the default fund

The basics in 30 seconds

Trump Accounts were created by the 2025 tax law and opened for contributions on July 4, 2026. They are IRA-style accounts for kids under 18. Children born from 2025 through 2028 get a one-time $1,000 deposit from Treasury. Family can add up to $5,000 a year, and employers can contribute too. On October 1, Treasury automatically opened an account for every eligible child, but a parent has to claim it in the official Trump Accounts app to manage it and to receive the $1,000. At 18, the account becomes a regular traditional IRA.

Follow the money

Investment rules during childhood are proposed: low-cost, non-leveraged U.S. stock index funds only, fees capped at 0.1%.

70 million accounts, but most are still empty

Automatic enrollment made the account count jump about tenfold overnight. Deposits did not follow. Roughly $4.5 billion spread across about 70 million accounts works out to an average of around $64 each, because most auto-created accounts haven't been claimed or funded yet.

Launch figures from news reports and Robinhood's Q2 call; October figures from Treasury as reported by Benzinga. Deposits include seed money, family money and philanthropic gifts.

Is this pumping the stock market? No. $4.5 billion is about 0.006% of the S&P 500's roughly $70.8 trillion value (August 2026). And because the fund buys shares that already exist from other investors, none of this money reaches the companies themselves. No private companies receive any of it.

Who actually gets paid

Firm	Role	How it earns	The real prize
Robinhood (HOOD)	Broker, sole initial trustee, app	Cost-plus contract with a small margin; spent $100M building the platform	Its brand in front of tens of millions of families
BNY (BK)	Treasury's financial agent, custody, back office	Contract with Treasury (terms not public)	Scale in custody and a deeper Treasury relationship
State Street (STT)	Runs SPYM, the exclusive default fund	0.02% a year, about $0.9M on $4.5B	Every unchosen dollar lands in its fund, for decades
Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard	Not in the program yet	Nothing today	Rollovers once families can move accounts

Robinhood doesn't break out Trump Account revenue. On its Q2 call it said "other revenue" of $143M was driven mainly by Trump Account service fees and subscriptions. A widely repeated $25M figure for the quarter did not appear in the call transcript we reviewed.

The fees are tiny. That's the point.

For comparison, State Street's yearly take on all $4.5B at 0.02% is roughly $900,000, small for a firm its size.

Nobody is getting rich on fees today. The business case is the long game: these accounts can turn infants into lifetime customers. Whoever holds the default and the app has a head start when the money becomes portable at 18. SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell has already pledged shares into accounts, and Elon Musk's share pledge may run through them too, so expect more large gifts that put company brands in front of kids.

Fair concerns, and the counterpoints

Concern: the contracts went to specific firms without a public competition, as far as reporting shows. BNY was picked even though Treasury moved a different contract (Direct Express) away from it last year over "readiness challenges."
Concern: one default fund concentrates tens of millions of accounts with a single manager.
Counterpoint: the fee cap is among the lowest anywhere, and cost-plus pricing limits Robinhood's margin.
Counterpoint: any program at this scale needs a custodian and a broker. Someone in the private sector was going to be paid.

What to watch

Final investment rules. The 0.1% fee cap and eligible-fund list are still proposed.
Claim rates. The gap between ~70M accounts and $4.5B in deposits shows how many families haven't claimed yet.
Gift-tax fix. Until Congress makes a technical correction, family contributions may require a gift tax return every year.
HOOD, BK and STT disclosures. Watch whether any of them start breaking out Trump Account revenue or assets.

Bottom line

The money in Trump Accounts buys a slice of the 500 biggest public U.S. companies, at a cost of pennies. It is far too small to move the market and never reaches private companies. The private-sector winners are Robinhood, BNY and State Street, and what they're really competing for is the next generation of customers.

Not investment advice. Sources: U.S. Treasury (auto-enrollment), U.S. Treasury (investment rules), 401k Specialist, Benzinga, TheStreet, American Banker, Robinhood Q1 results, Robinhood Q2 call transcript, Finance Magnates, Crypto Briefing (S&P 500 value), William Blair. Published Oct 24, 2026.