A new initiative for dealing with unclaimed Child Trust Funds

The Treasury has announced a new campaign aimed at reducing the number of unclaimed Child Trust Funds.

On 4 July 2026, the US government will officially launch Trump Accounts. While not another White House-linked cryptocurrency ‘investment’, these are new savings plans for children born between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2028 – roughly covering Trump’s second term. The US government will be placing $1,000 (about £750) into each account. Parents and other contributors can add up to $5,000 (£3,750) per year until the plan matures on the child’s 18th birthday.

If that structure sounds eerily familiar, that is because it has echoes of the UK’s Child Trust Funds (CTFs), which were established for children born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011. Over the period of the scheme, the UK government paid £2 billion into accounts for 6.3 million children, with most of them receiving a single payment of £250. More than one-in-four CTFs were opened by HMRC under a default process after parents or guardians failed to act within a year of the child becoming eligible.

The designers of the Trump Accounts have learned from the take-up problems of the CTF: Trump Accounts must be opened by parents, legal guardians, adult siblings or grandparents using an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) form. In the year the child reaches 18, their Trump Account automatically becomes an Individual Retirement Account (similar to a UK personal pension).

This maturity treatment is another learning point from UK experience. When CTFs were launched, there were no plans for what would happen at age 18; these were developed on a somewhat ad hoc basis shortly before the first CTFs matured in 2020. Matured CTFs that were not claimed continued in a post-CTF limbo with the same tax benefits until they were claimed or transferred into an ISA.

The latest report from HMRC shows that as of 5 April 2025, there were over 750,000 unclaimed matured CTFs. The Treasury has now decided to write to all 21-year-olds with unclaimed CTFs “in a bid to reunite account holders with their accounts”.

If you want to track down a CTF now, the starting point is the HMRC locator tool, which gives the name of the CTF provider, but not its value.