Unemployed families with young children receive drastically different support depending on where they live, with total benefits ranging from $8,448 in Florida to $19,236 in New Hampshire for a single parent with one child, according to a new report card published by the Niskanen Center in 2025. The analysis examines six major benefit programs across all 50 states and finds that America's patchwork of family assistance creates vast disparities in household resources as parents move from unemployment into work and climb the economic ladder. The report concludes that families don't experience these programs one at a time but as an interactive system with complex incentives and barriers.
For married couples with two children and no earnings, total assistance from social programs and refundable tax credits ranged from $11,928 in Louisiana, North Dakota, and New Hampshire to $30,109 in California. These income levels placed families between roughly 37 percent and 94 percent of the federal poverty threshold in 2025. When one parent works full time at the state minimum wage, a single parent with one child sees total income from earnings and benefits span from $26,726 in Alabama to $44,327 in Hawaii, putting families between about 105 percent and 210 percent of the poverty line. For married parents with two children at minimum wage, total income ranges from $29,054 in North Dakota to $59,641 in Hawaii. At the median wage, single parents with one child have total income from $42,674 in Mississippi to $63,780 in Massachusetts, while married parents with two children range from $51,092 in Arkansas to $73,528 in Hawaii, placing these families between 159 percent and 302 percent of the poverty threshold.
The report finds that a single parent with one child moving from welfare to work faces implicit marginal tax rates ranging from negative 42 percent in Wisconsin to 39 percent in New Hampshire, meaning some families actually gain money beyond their wages while others lose benefits. According to the analysis, when that same family climbs from a full-time minimum-wage job to a median-wage job, implicit marginal tax rates run from 15 percent in New York to 54 percent in Hawaii. The authors write that workers sometimes face "benefit cliffs" where implicit marginal tax rates climb to 100 percent and above, and an additional dollar of earnings may cost workers their entire benefit, potentially worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, leaving them worse off than if they'd earned less.
The report explains that high implicit marginal tax rates can trap low-income families with children in poverty, a problem social scientists and policymakers have recognized for decades. The complexity stems from how benefits stack and phase out simultaneously: income-tested programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Earned Income Tax Credits are available only to those with low or moderate earnings, and as earnings rise, these benefits begin to disappear or end abruptly. When families receive more than one income-tested benefit, these implicit tax rates pile on top of each other, creating a cumulative burden much higher than any single program would impose. The 2025 maximum monthly TANF benefit for a single parent with one child varied from just $162 in Arkansas to $1,057 in New Hampshire, reflecting how states set and adjust their assistance levels differently. Twenty-seven states supplement the federal Earned Income Tax Credit with their own refundable credits, with rates ranging from 4 percent of the federal credit in Wisconsin to 50 percent in Colorado, and eleven states offer refundable Child Tax Credits independent of the federal program.
The report emphasizes that policymakers have inadvertently created new barriers to upward mobility for families by pushing them to the phaseout threshold for many means-tested programs just as they start earning beyond minimum wage. By focusing exclusively on single programs in isolation, advocates and officials risk missing how the interactive system actually works for families on the ground. The analysis provides a state-by-state breakdown showing that refundable credits are now the primary supplement lifting families with minimum-wage and median-wage workers above the poverty line, while social assistance programs remain the main income source for families with no earnings. The bottom line: where you live determines not just how much help you get, but whether working more actually pays off.