Assistance program
Child Support Services
$32.8 Billion committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Administration for Children and Families, Health and Human Services, Department of
- Assistance
- Formula Grants
- CFDA number
- 93.563
- What it does
- The purpose of this program is to enforce the support obligations owed by absent parents to their children, locate absent parents, establish paternity, and obtain child, spousal and medical support.
- Who benefits
- The State must provide support enforcement services to: (1) All applicants for, or recipients of TANF, Foster Care Maintenance Payments, and Medicaid, for whom an assignment to the State of support rights has been made and who are in need of such services; (2) all individuals who cease to receive TANF; (3) individuals who provide authorization to the IV-D agency to continue support enforcement services; and (4) any other individual who is in need of such services and who has applied for them.
- Who applies
- All States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Guam. Each of these jurisdictions is required to establish or designate a single and separate State Child Support Enforcement Agency. Tribes are eligible and we currently have sixty tribal child support programs.
- Authorized by
- Social Security
- Program site
- https://www.acf.hhs.gov/css ↗
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
How the money flows
Committed dollars by how this program's money is paid out.
Direct payments
$133.8K
<1%
Grants
$32.8B
100%
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
Administering agencies
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments