Your Kid's Trump Account Can Hold One Kind of Fund. The 0.1% Fee Cap Has a Hole in It.

If your kid has a Trump Account, you now know what’s allowed to sit inside it. One thing. A cheap index fund that tracks U.S. stocks. That’s the whole menu until the year they turn 17.

For most families that’s good news, and it’s good news in a way that almost never happens in this corner of finance.

Treasury and the IRS put out the proposed investment rules on August 20. To be an eligible investment, a fund has to be a mutual fund or ETF that tracks an equity index of primarily U.S. companies, the S&P 500 being the obvious one. It can’t use leverage. And its annual fees and expenses can’t exceed 0.1% of the balance.

That last number is the interesting one. A tenth of a percent is stricter than what most people are stuck with in a workplace 401(k). Somebody decided that the way to keep this program from getting quietly farmed for fees was to write the fee limit into the rule instead of trusting the industry. Smart.

Here’s the catch.

The 0.1% cap covers the fund. It does not cover the trustee. In the proposed regulations, the limit on annual fees and expenses doesn’t apply to what the institution holding your child’s account charges to hold it. So the fund inside the box has a hard fee ceiling, and the box itself does not.

That’s the number to hunt for, and nobody is going to lead their marketing with it.

The exclusions run longer than the menu. No bonds. No target-date fund that shifts to safety as the kid gets older. No international index. No sector funds. No actively managed anything. And ESG funds are named and barred outright, on the reasoning that a values screen works like a sector screen. Treasury pointed to a State Street S&P 500 index ETF as the default option, plus four other low-cost index funds.

Translation: from birth to 17, your child’s account is 100% U.S. stocks, and there’s no dial to turn. Understand that before a market drop in year 16 surprises you. The restrictions lift on December 31 of the year they turn 17, which is exactly when you might want to de-risk anyway.

Do this. Open whatever statement or portal your child’s account uses and find the account fee, custodial fee, or maintenance fee, separate from the fund’s expense ratio. If your trustee won’t put it in writing, move the account. If you have a choice of trustee, that fee is now the main thing that separates them, because the fund side is already capped for everyone.

And if you want a say, these are proposed rules, not final ones. Comments close October 20, 2026, and the trustee fee gap is the obvious thing to write about.

For the rest of the program, see our Trump Accounts explainer on the $1,000 seed and what your employer can add. To see what a capped-fee index fund compounds into over 17 years, run it through our investment calculator.

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