How much federal money each state gets for child support

Three ways federal money moves

1. A 66 percent match on program costs. For every dollar a state spends running its program, the federal government reimburses 66 cents, with no upper limit (42 U.S.C. 655(a)(2)(C): "66 percent for fiscal year 1990 and each fiscal year thereafter"). In FY 2025 that was $4,222,938,100 of $6,989,799,477 in total program costs. [3, 6]
2. Incentive payments from a capped pool. The federal government also divides a fixed annual pool among the states based on five performance measures (paternity, orders, current support collected, arrears collected, cost-effectiveness), each weighted by the state's collections. The latest final figures are for FY 2023: $678,795,663, exactly that year's pool. States must spend incentives "to supplement, and not supplant" their program funds (42 U.S.C. 658a(f)). [4, 5]
3. Money flowing back. When a family receives TANF cash assistance or a child is in foster care, support collected can be kept to repay that assistance. The federal government's share of those collections in FY 2025 was $406,385,744 (Table P-14). [1]

Program cost, all 54 programs, FY 2025

$6,989,799,477

Federal share of that cost

$4,222,938,100 (60.4%)

Incentive payments, FY 2023 actual

$678,795,663

Child support collected and paid out, FY 2025

$26,589,820,114

Collected per $1 of program cost

$4.01

State by state

Shading uses five equal-count groups, so each shade holds about a fifth of the states. Bigger states get more money mostly because they have more cases; the table lets you compare the federal percentage and the collections per dollar, which do not depend on size.

All 54 programs

Tables P-43, P-44, P-4 and P-36 (FY 2025, preliminary) and P-38 (FY 2023 incentive actuals). The 54 rows add up exactly to the printed national totals in every column. [1]

Why the federal share is not exactly 66 percent

Nationally the federal government paid 60.4% of program costs in FY 2025, not 66 percent. The main reason is that spending a state pays for with its incentive money gets no federal match: since October 1, 2007, "no amount shall be paid to any State on account of amounts expended from amounts paid to the State under section 658a" (42 U.S.C. 655(a)(1)). States spent $533,703,780 of incentive money on their programs in FY 2025 (Table P-46). Leave that out and the federal share is about 65 percent; the rest of the gap comes from adjustments for earlier quarters. Texas is the clearest example: about a quarter of its program cost was paid from incentives, so its federal share shows as 49.0%. [1, 3]

Higher federal rates existed and have ended: 90 percent for paternity laboratory tests (cut to 66 percent on October 1, 2006) and 90 and 80 percent for building the statewide computer systems in the late 1990s. Tribal programs are funded separately and are not in these tables. [3, 6]

The debate about incentives

The Congressional Research Service has noted that because every performance score is multiplied by a state's collections, "the incentive payment calculation is so heavily dependent on child support collections" that "the more populous states receiv[e] the largest incentive payments." Critics read this as rewarding collection volume. The program's design answer is in the statute: the pool is fixed (and grows only with inflation), so states compete for shares of the same amount, and every incentive dollar must be reinvested in the program. The federal office describes incentives as "the amount of money states earn for running an efficient child support program." [7, 4, 1]

Neither point means a state or an agency profits from any one family's order: the money is formula-driven across the whole caseload and ring-fenced for the program. The pool for FY 2026 is $755,389,396. [8] See also the federal law behind child support and the history of child support.