About 2.6 million U.S. parents provided $26.6 billion in financial support to 3.7 million children 21 or over who lived outside their households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The SIPP is the only survey on support provided to specific people who live outside the household, the number of people supported, and annual amounts.
This does not take into account money parents spent on adult children living at home. In 2024, 58.3% of men and 56.4% of women ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents.
Historical Patterns
Figure 1 shows the total annual amounts given to children 21 or older living outside the household during the 11-year span from 2014 to 2024.
Because this financial support is informal, fluctuations in the amounts given are expected. However, it is worth highlighting that there was a significant increase in support in 2017 that remained elevated in 2018, coinciding with an increase in earnings of all workers. This was followed by a significant drop in support in 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Most parents (72.7%) financially supported one adult child; 18.8% provided support to two and 8.6% to three or more. Table 1 shows that in 2024, the total median annual amount provided to adult children was $4,725 (half gave more and half gave less).
Who Provided Support to Adult Children?
Parents who financially supported their adult children differed demographically from other parents age 36 and over. As Figure 2 shows, they were less likely to be born in the United States (70.3% vs. 77.5%) and more likely to:
- Be men (55.7% vs. 46.1%).
- Be employed (68.3% vs. 58.0%).
- Have a bachelor’s degree or higher (46.0% vs. 36.8%).
- Be divorced (20.8% vs. 14.3%).
- Have earned income from bonds or stocks (21.8% vs. 16.8%).
Parents financially helping adult children had a higher median annual income than those that did not provide support ($63,440 versus $41,930). However, their median household incomes were not statistically different ($110,700 versus $98,110).
This might be explained by the presence of larger households among those who did not support adult children — around 48.3% lived in households with three or more people compared to 31.3% of those who supported adult children.
Financial Support May Also Go to Parents and Other Relatives
In 2024, around 11.4 million people in the United States gave $78.1 billion to 19.0 million people living outside their households. In addition to the support provided to adult children, they financially supported:
- 7.2 million parents ($20.2 billion).
- 5.8 million relatives other than parents and adult children ($22.8 billion).
- 2.4 million nonrelatives ($8.4 billion).
Nearly two-thirds (64.6%) of providers gave financial support to either parents or adult children, in keeping with other findings showing these two groups are the primary recipients of financial assistance.
The SIPP is a nationally representative, longitudinal survey administered by the Census Bureau that provides comprehensive information on the dynamics of income, employment, household composition and government program participation.
More information is available on the SIPP webpage. Technical documentation and more information about SIPP data quality are on the SIPP Technical Documentation webpage. The estimates presented here are subject to sampling and nonsampling error.
About the author: Liza C. Valle is an analyst at the Census Bureau.