Form 4547 Line by Line: the Trump Account Election and $1,000 Deposit

The short answer. Form 4547, “Trump Account Election(s),” is the single-page form a parent, guardian, or other authorized adult files to open a Trump account for an eligible child and, separately, to request the one-time $1,000 pilot program deposit if the child qualifies for it. The current version is the December 2025 revision. It can be filed three ways: attached to an e-filed tax return, mailed on paper, or — since May 28, 2026 — submitted electronically through the IRS’s own Individual Online Account. It is not itself part of a tax return, so it does not have to go in with any particular year’s filing, but the statute, as restated in the regulations, puts a real outer limit on the account-opening election: December 31 of the year the child turns 17, meaning before the calendar year of the eighteenth birthday begins. Since October 1, 2026, the Treasury Department has also been opening accounts on its own for eligible children, as described in the section on auto accounts below.

What the form actually does

A Trump account is the child savings vehicle created under 26 U.S.C. section 530A, and Form 4547 is the mechanism for telling the IRS a specific child should have one. The form’s own header lays out the logic plainly: if a child is eligible for a Trump account and the filer wants to open one, they complete Parts I, II, and IV; if that same child is also eligible for the $1,000 pilot program contribution, the filer additionally checks the box in Part III. The two elections are related but not identical — a family can open an account without claiming the pilot deposit, though not the reverse, since the pilot money only lands in an account that has already been opened.

The instructions are explicit that this is not a tax-return item in the way a Schedule or a credit worksheet is. The election “is not a part of any individual’s tax return and is independent of the filing of the income tax return,” language that came from the proposed regulation implementing the account-opening rules, REG-117270-25, which Treasury withdrew on September 30, 2026 through the companion proposed regulation at 91 FR 61812, issued alongside temporary regulations. That independence is what makes the three filing paths possible in the first place: the fastest and, per the instructions, safest and easiest route is to file Form 4547 alongside a current-year e-filed return, but a filer who needs to submit it on its own can mail a paper copy to the address IRS.gov lists for returns that are not enclosing a payment, and since the spring of 2026 there has also been a way to submit it without any paper tax form at all, described below.

Part by part

The form itself runs one page, split into four parts plus a paid-preparer block.

Part I — Parent, Guardian, or Other Authorized Individual Information. This section identifies the adult making the election, and the instructions note directly that whoever is listed here becomes the account’s “responsible party” — the person Treasury and the trustee treat as authorized to act on the account going forward. It asks for the filer’s name, Social Security number, home address, date of birth, phone number, and email address.

Part II — Child’s Information. This is where the form’s structure runs a two-column layout: “Child 1” and “Child 2,” so one Form 4547 can carry the elections for two children at once. A family with more than two eligible children attaches additional copies of the form rather than trying to fit everyone onto one page. For each child, the section collects a name, Social Security number, date of birth, relationship to the filer, and a home address — with an option to check a box indicating the child’s address matches Part I, or to fill in separate address lines if not, including a set of lines reserved for a foreign address. It also includes a box confirming the filer is authorized to open the account for that child, which the instructions direct filers to review before checking.

Part III — Pilot Program Contribution Election. This is the section that matters only for children who meet all four eligibility conditions for the $1,000 deposit, detailed in the next section below. The form states those conditions directly above the checkbox: the child must have been born in the 2025–2028 window, must be the filer’s qualifying child, must be a U.S. citizen, and must have a valid Social Security number. Checking the box is the affirmative election; leaving it blank means no pilot deposit is requested for that child, even if an account is being opened for them in Part II.

Part IV — Consent, Signature, and Paid Preparer Use Only. The form closes with a consent-to-disclose-information section, a perjury declaration, a signature line with a date, and a block for a paid preparer’s name, PTIN, firm EIN, and address if one helped prepare the election.

Two signature rules are worth flagging because they differ depending on how the form goes in. A paper Form 4547 requires a handwritten signature — the instructions are unusually direct that “digital, electronic, or typed-font signatures are not valid signatures for Form 4547 filed on paper.” If a return preparer e-files the election instead, the signature runs through a companion form, Form 8879-TA, the IRS e-file signature authorization built specifically for Form 4547; it comes into play when a Practitioner PIN is used or when the filer authorizes the preparer to generate a PIN on their behalf.

The $1,000 pilot deposit, and how it actually lands

The pilot program lives in its own section of the tax code, 26 U.S.C. section 6434, separate from the account-creation rules in section 530A. The mechanics are worth walking through because they are not intuitive: the statute treats the eligible child as having made a $1,000 payment against their own tax liability for the year of the election, and the Treasury Department then pays that amount into the child’s Trump account. Four conditions have to be met at once — the child must be born after December 31, 2024, and before January 1, 2029; no one can have already made a pilot election for that child before; the child must be a U.S. citizen; and the Social Security number used must have been issued before the date of the election.

The deposit does not arrive the moment the box is checked. Treasury guidance is specific that a pilot program contribution “will be deposited into the Trump account of an eligible child no earlier than July 4, 2026,” and only after Treasury can confirm with the account’s trustee that the account itself has actually been opened — the election alone does not create an account if Part II was never properly completed and processed. There is also a built-in safety valve for families who elect in good faith: if it later turns out the child did not meet the qualifying-child test for the year in question, the election is not automatically undone, as long as the other requirements were satisfied at the time.

The government gave this deposit its own accounting mechanism, described in a proposed regulation as a “special taxable year” — a short period tied only to the processing of the pilot election, deemed to close immediately, that carries no federal income tax liability of its own and has no bearing on the filer’s actual tax year. In plain terms, it is the technical scaffolding that lets the IRS generate and refund the $1,000 into the account without touching anything else on the family’s return. That proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on March 9, 2026, with a public comment period that closed April 8, 2026. One more detail families sometimes assume incorrectly: the $1,000 pilot deposit does not compete with the account’s regular annual contribution ceiling. It sits entirely outside that limit, which is covered next.

Contribution rules once the account is open

Contributions of any kind — from the pilot program aside — could not begin until July 4, 2026, twelve months after the law creating Trump accounts was enacted. From that date forward, the aggregate amount that can go into a single child’s account in a calendar year is capped at $5,000, a figure fixed at $5,000 for both 2026 and 2027 before cost-of-living adjustments begin to apply starting in 2028.

Employers can contribute too, under a separate provision, 26 U.S.C. section 128, that excludes up to $2,500 a year from an employee’s income when the employer puts money into a Trump account on the employee’s behalf. That $2,500 ceiling is worth reading carefully: it applies per employee, not per child. An employee with two or more children who each have a Trump account does not get $2,500 for each one — the employer’s contribution across all of that employee’s children is capped at $2,500 in total for the year. Section 128 contributions are not an addition on top of the $5,000 annual limit; they count toward it, the same as money from parents, relatives, or anyone else.

Once money is in the account, what it can be invested in is also restricted. Eligible investments are limited to mutual funds or ETFs that track a qualifying index — the S&P 500 or a comparable broad index made up primarily of U.S. companies — that do not use leverage and that keep annual fees and expenses under 0.1 percent of the invested balance. A safe harbor treats an index as “primarily” U.S. companies if American firms make up at least 90 percent of its weighting. A proposed regulation published August 20, 2026, refined several of these mechanics: it widened the ETF definition to include ETF share classes of mutual funds, replaced a mechanical leverage test with one based on whether a fund’s strategies materially increase risk of loss, expressly permitted funds to engage in securities lending as long as they retain full economic exposure to the securities lent, and drew a line excluding funds-of-funds that track more than one underlying index, while allowing a fund of funds built around a single index to qualify.

The account is designed to stay locked until the child is an adult. With limited exceptions — rollovers, a one-time rollover into an ABLE account available only in the year the beneficiary turns 17, correction of excess contributions, and distributions on the beneficiary’s death — no money comes out before January 1 of the year the child turns 18.

Auto accounts: when Treasury opens the account for you

Form 4547 is no longer the only way a child ends up with a Trump account. On September 30, 2026, Treasury and the IRS published temporary regulations (T.D. 10056, 91 FR 61705) that add broad automatic enrollment, and the preamble explains what changed: “Under the prior Sec. 1.530A-1 NPRM (91 FR at 11196), elections to establish an initial Trump account generally would be made by persons other than the Secretary.” The new rules reverse that default. According to the same preamble, “on or about October 1, 2026, the Secretary will make an election to establish an auto account for each individual who the Secretary has determined satisfies the age and social security number requirements and for whom no prior election has been made by a person other than the Secretary.” Form 4547 stays available, but the preamble describes it as the route for “any rare exceptions.”

The draft 2026 edition of IRS Publication 590-A, which covers Trump accounts in a section of Chapter 1 on pages 38-39, describes the same change from the taxpayer’s side. It is a draft, so wording and page numbers may shift before the final version. Under the heading “Initial Trump accounts,” it says:

“Beginning October 1, 2026, any initial Trump account established through an election is an auto account, regardless of when the election was made. If you made an election before October 1, 2026, but your account wasn’t established by September 30, 2026, the Secretary will establish an auto account for you. During the growth period, an auto account can receive only qualified general contributions and the $1,000 federal pilot program contribution if you made the required election.”

Under “Automatic enrollment,” the draft adds:

“Beginning October 1, 2026, the Secretary may make an election to automatically establish an auto account, known as a Trump account, for eligible children who don’t already have an account, based on information available to the Secretary. To be eligible, a child must be under age 18 at the end of the year the account is established and have a valid social security number (SSN).”

For families who filed Form 4547 before the switch, activation decided which kind of account they got. The preamble explains that an election by someone other than the Treasury does not create the account by itself: “In order to establish an initial Trump account that is not an auto account, the account must be activated by the person making the election or claim pursuant to instructions from the trustee after the election is made.” Under Sec. 1.530A-1T(d)(2)(ii), however, any initial Trump account established after auto enrollment began is an auto account “regardless of whether the election was made before, on, or after October 1, 2026,” so an election not followed by an established account by September 30, 2026 ends up as an auto account, and so does a Form 4547 filed today. Activation now matters at the claiming stage: in the words of the draft Publication 590-A, “The receiving account must be activated before the transfer or other contributions can be made.”

The preamble leaves room for the $1,000 pilot deposit to reach that auto account “in limited circumstances where a pilot program election has been made by a pilot program-electing individual pursuant to section 6434, but an account was not activated.” Treasury’s October 1, 2026 announcement, however, told families that “Eligible children must also have their Trump Account claimed to receive the one-time $1,000 seed contribution from Treasury,” so claiming the account is the safe course. The Treasury cannot make that pilot election itself, which is why the Part III box on Form 4547 still matters.

An auto account is deliberately limited, and the draft Publication 590-A explains how a parent takes control of one: “A parent, legal guardian, or other authorized individual who is legally authorized to manage the child’s financial affairs may file a claim for an auto account by providing required information through an application provided by the Secretary. Another way to claim an auto account is by establishing a claimed initial Trump account and having the funds in the auto account transferred to the claimed initial Trump account for the child.” The preamble contrasts the two accounts directly: an auto account “can only receive qualified general contributions and the $1,000 pilot program contribution,” while a claimed initial Trump account “can receive any contribution that is permitted to be made to a Trump account (such as a contribution from the family of the account beneficiary or from an employer).” Family and employer contributions, in other words, belong to the claimed account rather than to the auto account.

Who else can file the election

An update the IRS posted in June 2026 extends who counts as an “authorized individual” for opening an account. A child welfare agency, or its equivalent, run by a state, territorial, or tribal government can act as legal guardian and elect to open a Trump account for a child in its care, following special instructions the IRS coordinates directly with each government through its Office of Governmental Liaison. That access has one carve-out: the agency itself cannot elect the $1,000 pilot program contribution for a child, since it is not that child’s qualifying-relative filer in the tax sense. A parent or other individual — including a foster parent — who separately anticipates the child will be their own qualifying child under section 152(c) can still make that pilot election, even while the agency handles the account-opening side.

The guidance trail behind the form

Form 4547 did not arrive on its own; a series of notices and proposed regulations built the framework underneath it, each covering a different piece:

• Notice 2025-68 (December 2, 2025) — the first substantial guidance, a lengthy question-and-answer notice covering how accounts are established, how the pilot program and other contributions work, eligible investments, distributions, and how Trump accounts interact with existing IRA rules.
• REG-117270-25 (March 9, 2026) — the proposed regulation covering the general mechanics of opening an account: who counts as an authorized individual, how the election deadline works, and how a responsible party is designated or changed. It was withdrawn on September 30, 2026, by the companion proposed regulation at 91 FR 61812, which reproposed its rules alongside the temporary regulation below.
• T.D. 10056 (91 FR 61705, September 30, 2026) — temporary regulations (Secs. 1.530A-1T and 1.530A-7T) on general Trump account requirements, establishing an initial Trump account, automatic enrollment by the Secretary, and qualified general contributions, issued with a companion notice of proposed rulemaking at 91 FR 61812.
• REG-117002-25 (March 9, 2026) — the companion proposed regulation focused specifically on the section 6434 pilot program, including the special-taxable-year mechanism described above.
• The August 20, 2026 proposed regulation on eligible investments — narrower in scope, refining the leverage test, the ETF definition, and the securities-lending and fund-of-funds rules summarized above.
• Notice 2026-32 — administrative guidance letting a carrying broker-dealer satisfy the nonbank-trustee net-worth test using existing SEC capital rules instead of a separate showing, relevant because Trump account trustees are approved under the same general nonbank-trustee framework used for IRAs.
• Rev. Proc. 2026-25 — a separate safe harbor dealing with gift tax reporting for people who contribute to a child’s Trump account, covered in full in this site’s guide to Trump account gifts and the Rev. Proc. 2026-25 safe harbor.

If the election was missed on last year’s return

Because Form 4547 stands apart from the tax return itself, missing it during one filing season is not the end of the option. The instructions are direct that the form should not be attached to a Form 1040-X and that a 1040, 1040-SR, or 1040-NR should not be amended just to attach it. Instead, a filer who wants to open an account after the fact has three routes available: mail a paper Form 4547 at any time to the address the IRS publishes for returns not enclosing a payment; sign in to an IRS Individual Online Account and submit the election electronically, a feature the IRS turned on May 28, 2026, that also lets a filer check the submission status of an election already sent in; or use the dedicated online tool at the government’s Trump Accounts site. None of those paths carries its own filing-season deadline. The only date that matters is the same one that applies to filing with a return in the first place — December 31 of the calendar year the child turns 17.

Since October 1, 2026, though, Treasury says every eligible child under 18 with a valid Social Security number already has an automatically opened account, and a Form 4547 filed now also produces an auto account; a parent or guardian has to claim it in the official Trump Accounts app before family members or an employer can contribute.

For families also working through the mechanics of this year’s return more broadly, this site’s line-by-line look at the 2026 Form 1040 draft covers what else has changed on the main form itself. And for the separate question of how an employer’s contribution to a child’s account shows up at year-end, see this site’s W-2 Box 12 codes list, which covers how employer-provided benefits are reported on the wage statement.

Sources

• Internal Revenue Service — Form 4547, Trump Account Election(s), December 2025 revision
• Internal Revenue Service — Instructions for Form 4547, Rev. December 2025
• Internal Revenue Service — About Form 8879-TA, IRS e-file Signature Authorization for Form 4547
• Internal Revenue Service — Update to Form 4547 for State, Territorial and Tribal Child Welfare Agencies, June 11, 2026
• Internal Revenue Service — IR-2026-68 (May 28, 2026), new Trump Account election features in IRS Individual Online Account
• Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School — 26 U.S.C. section 530A; 26 U.S.C. section 6434; 26 U.S.C. section 128
• Federal Register — REG-117270-25, “Trump Accounts,” 91 FR 11194 (March 9, 2026); REG-117002-25, “Trump Accounts Contribution Pilot Program,” 91 FR 11203 (March 9, 2026); proposed regulation on eligible investments, 91 FR 54280 (August 20, 2026)
• Internal Revenue Service — Notice 2025-68, 2025-52 I.R.B. 856
• Federal Register — T.D. 10056, “Trump Accounts,” temporary regulations, 91 FR 61705 (September 30, 2026); companion proposed regulation, “Trump Accounts,” 91 FR 61812 (September 30, 2026)
• Internal Revenue Service — Draft Publication 590-A (2026), Contributions to Individual Retirement Arrangements (IRAs), pp. 38-39, Trump Accounts section of Chapter 1
• U.S. Department of the Treasury — October 1, 2026 announcement on automatic enrollment in Trump Accounts