How many parents have their driver's license suspended for unpaid child support?
After making a child support app a couple years ago, I started getting emails like this:
I was incarcerated for 20 years, and apparently child support was accumulating during that time, which I was told could not happen. Now my driver's license is suspended…there must be a misunderstanding…Please help me navigate and rectify this situation. I am in dire need of guidance.
Then earlier this year I saw a headline that the California Department of Child Support Services was reinstating 149,000 driver's licenses for low-income parents. That’s a big number. Had the wealthiest and most progressive state in the country really suspended the driver's licenses of 149,000 poor parents? So naturally it got me wondering: How many parents in the U.S. have their driver's license suspended for unpaid child support?
First, a bit of background
“Child Support” is a federal-state program that mandates and mediates payments between separated parents on behalf of their children. More kids in the U.S. live in single-parent households than in any country in the world, so child support plays a uniquely central role in family life. The program began in the 70s as a "welfare cost recovery program," whereby states collected child support from non-custodial parents in order to reimburse the government when their kids enrolled in welfare programs like SNAP and Medicaid. The program has since evolved into an aspirationally family-first social services program, including a 2018 rebrand of the federal agency from the Child Support Enforcement Agency to the Child Support Services Agency.
In terms of scale, over 15 million parents pay and receive $30 billion in child support annually on behalf of 13 million children. There is over $100 billion of outstanding child support debt, called "arrears," the majority of which is owed by poor parents and considered uncollectible. When parents get behind on child support, states have a number of enforcement tools to compel payments. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) granted states the power to suspend parents' driver's licenses. Unsurprisingly, this practice has been forever contentious, with advocates arguing that it’s counterproductive to impede parents’ ability to work.
But this post isn't about the wisdom or effectiveness of the practice. We're just here to count the beans!
Counting the beans 🫘
It doesn't take much digging to conclude that nobody knows the answer to our question. Official federal data doesn't include anything on license suspensions. The GAO doesn't know. CRS doesn't know. NCSL doesn't know. The AAMVA doesn't know. Leading advocates like the Aspen Institute and Fines & Fees Justice Center don't know. I think it's fair to say that nobody is keeping track of how many parents have their driver's license suspended for unpaid child support…
Here are a few things we do know:
In California, more than 149k low-income parents had suspended licenses for unpaid child support as of December 2024. These were reinstated in January of this year when Senate Bill 1055 came into effect (DCSS press release). We'll be exceedingly conservative and assume these represent all license suspensions in CA.
In Florida, approximately 210k parents had suspended licenses for unpaid child support in 2019 (Driving on Empty; FL DHSMV data acquired by The Fines and Fees Justice Center).
In Ohio, 76k parents had suspended licenses for unpaid child support in 2020 (Road to Nowhere; OH BMV data acquired by the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland).
In New York City, 82k parents were "in the [driver's license] suspension process" for unpaid child support in 2023 (Confronting structural racism in the child support program; data from the NYC Department of Social Services). We'll assume that one-third (27k) of these parents actually had a suspended license, which would align with data from other states.
"In Minnesota, roughly 1 in 5 [non-custodial parents] with a child support obligation have a license suspended for non-payment" (Minnesota’s Driver’s License Suspension Pilot Impact Evaluation Report, by MN Management & Budget).
Wisconsin suspended licenses for approximately 1.8% of their caseload each year from 2015 through 2021 (less 2017), but this data point doesn't help us estimate the point-in-time prevalence without knowing reinstatement rates (License Suspension and Civil Contempt as Enforcement Tools).
Notably, I couldn't find anything credible for Texas or Michigan, two of the largest child support programs in the country, which together account for nearly 20% of the national caseload. So we have a hodgepodge of data points covering 4 states and 1 city. Combining this with the 2023 federal caseload data, we get this snapshot:
Between 11% – 36% of the caseload in our sample states has a suspended driver's license for unpaid child support. Let’s extrapolate and make a few adjustments:
Extrapolating this range to the national caseload: 1.3M – 4.3M.
Then subtracting CA's recent 149k reinstated licenses: 1.15M – 4.15M.
And rounding down: Our sample states are quite a bit more punitive than average, so the truth is probably on the lower end of the range. For example, the average state waits for parents to get ~3 months behind on child support before initiating the license suspension process, whereas our sample states are closer to 2 months. Florida is the most punitive state in this sense, often initiating the suspension process after a single missed payment. So let's round down again and just take the bottom half of the range: 1M – 2M.
Last, we can gut-check this range with a secondary crude analysis of the federal data. In 2023, 75% of the national caseload had arrears, and 36% of those cases had no collections during the year. This comes out to 3.3M total cases with arrears and zero collections. So our 1M – 2M estimate implies that about 30% – 60% of cases with arrears and zero collections had a suspended license. This seems pretty conservative and pretty plausible ✔️.
So there you have it, our officially unofficial back-of-the-napkin estimate:
This is an admittedly very rough hand wavy exercise – more like a McKinsey interview question than rigorous research – but in lieu of official government statistics (which should exist!) or intensive ProPublica-style data journalism (which should be done!), I think it’s the best we can do. With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if this was off by a factor of 2 or more, so please reach out if you see any important mistakes or omissions.
Postscript - an ecosystem in transition
While researching this question, I came across some big policy efforts in the works:
California essentially ended this practice for low-income parents in January of this year due to SB 1055.
Ohio just cancelled many non-driving-related license suspensions and created more pathways for reinstatement (House Bill 29). However, the child support provisions are opt-in and require parents to file a motion with a court to regain driving privileges, which surely will significantly impede its impact.
Maryland will protect parents below 250% FPL from license suspension starting July 2026 (House Bill 681).
Michigan was ahead of the curve and has required courts to determine that the payer has "an ability to pay" and is "willfully" not making payments before suspending a parent's license since 2021 (MCL 552.628).
No doubt there are more. After inadvertently creating an industrial-scale driver's license suspension program of poor parents over three decades, it is being unwound right now.
Which leaves me wondering…is this all going to work? Typically there’s a multi-year year gap between when legislation is signed and when it works (or doesn’t), and during these years the advocates may shift focus, the insider champions may move on to the next emergency, and the point of it all can be forgotten. Some call this the “implementation gap” - the tendency for outcomes to persist through policy changes in complex social systems:
Personally, I’d like to check whether these new policies actually yield results for families in the coming years. Much of the relevant data is technically in the public domain, so with a few dozen public records requests and some data schlepping, rigorous answers are within reach. If any readers are interested in supporting or collaborating on this effort, please reach out. If we're going to suspend a million parents' driver's licenses, the least we can do is keep count…
I’d love to hear your comments, corrections, or anything else this provokes. Thanks to Alan for reviewing the first draft.
You might check with http://Muckrock.com, they have a project they inherited, “The Data Liberation Project” that might be a complement to your mention that more data is required in this space (ie building FOIA requests to go out to all relevant agencies to collect these metrics and aggregate for analysis). Great piece!
It's even worse than this.
Most states outsource child support enforcement to a private company which gets paid per action taken, and so they do things like "accidentally" double your child support amount, backdate it 18 months, which puts you over $5,000 in debt which allows them to suspend, not just your driver's license, but professional licenses, too, so you immediately lose your job.
It takes an average of 5 months to get into court to get the "accidental" increase changed back, but they will not backdate the decrease, so you are stuck with the debt, and professional licenses do not automatically resume after a suspension, even if it was "accidental" or even provably intentional; there is a mandatory waiting period which gets longer each time it happens, so you are out of work for months.
This happened to me every year for a decade; I went from a six-figure income as an insurance agent to working two menial jobs - retail and pizza delivery - but they kept using my original salary as the basis of child support. I lost my house, my car, my savings, my career...
Then there is the sexism; I was paying child support on one child, while I had full custody of two other children from another woman, who was ordered to pay child support to me but didn't, and when it got to court, she gave the judge a sob story and he just closed the case. I never saw a dime, but it was still counted as income for the purposes of calculating the child support I had to pay.
This is an evil system which incentivizes women to break up their families by giving them the ability to have the father put in prison for nothing, while simultaneously depriving women of Agency, since they obviously cannot be responsible for getting pregnant and having children... all of the blame, all of the responsibility, lands on the father, while the mother is just assumed to be the aggrieved party in all cases.
This is so deeply wrong that it is hard to understand how such a situation ever came about in the first place.