$111 Billion in Unpaid Child Support — Four Years' Worth of Everything the System Collects

The Office of Child Support Services publishes a preliminary data report each year, and the FY 2025 edition contains three figures that belong together and are almost never printed together.

$26.59 billion was collected and distributed in FY 2025 — down from $29.52 billion in 2021, a fall of 9.8% in four years.

$111.7 billion in arrears is outstanding across the states and the District of Columbia. That figure has barely moved since 2021, when it stood at $111.8 billion. Four years of effort and the backlog is where it was.

59.5% of cases received any payment at all in FY 2025 — down from 66.7% in 2021. Counting only cases that actually have a support order in place, 69.5% received something, down from 76.2%.

Part of the decline in collections is simply that the program is smaller: 11.31 million cases in FY 2025 against 12.67 million in 2021, covering 11.98 million children instead of 13.20 million. Fewer cases, less money.

But the two are not falling at the same rate, and that is what the percentage figures capture. The caseload fell 10.7%; the share of cases receiving anything fell from 66.7% to 59.5%. The number of cases that collected something dropped from 8.44 million to 6.72 million — a fall of 20.3%, twice the rate at which the caseload shrank.

Meanwhile the cost of running it rose: administrative expenditure went from $5.91 billion to $6.99 billion, an increase of 18.3% while collections fell. The program now returns about $3.80 for every dollar spent, against $5.00 in 2021.

Set each state's arrears against what it actually collects in a year and the range is startling. Pennsylvania's backlog equals 0.6 years of collections. Alabama's equals 13.4. California is at 7.1, New Mexico 6.8, Arizona 6.7, Alaska 6.6; at the low end, North Dakota 1.6, Utah 1.9, Wyoming 1.9, Minnesota 2.1.

It is tempting to read that as a ranking of how well states chase payment. It is not, or not mainly. The federal table's own definition says arrears figures may include interest and penalties — and states differ completely in whether they charge interest on unpaid support, at what rate, and how readily they write old debt off. A state that charges 12% interest and never writes anything off will accumulate a mountain of arrears that no collection effort could ever clear; a state that charges none and writes off uncollectable debt will look efficient on the same measure.

What the number does tell you honestly is the size of the backlog relative to the machinery working on it. In most of the country, a parent owed arrears is standing behind several years' worth of everything the state manages to collect.

Two practical points follow from the data rather than from advice.

An order is not a payment. 85.6% of cases have an order established, but only 59.5% saw any money. The gap between those two figures — about a quarter of all cases — is where enforcement actually happens: wage withholding, tax refund interception, license suspension, contempt.

Wage withholding is where four fifths of the money comes from. The federal tables record $21.5 billion received through wage withholding in FY 2025 — 81.8% measured against the $26.3 billion distributed. (The two tables count slightly different things, money received against money paid out, so treat that as a proportion rather than a subtraction.) If the paying parent has an employer, that is the lever. If they do not, the collection rate falls away, and that is much of what the 40.5% of cases with no collections consists of.

None of this is legal advice, and the enforcement tools available differ by state. What the numbers establish is the scale: this is not a rare failure but the ordinary condition of the system.