The cost of child welfare data systems
$2.28 billion in federal and state claims. HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) counted claims for new builds and systems still in transition from 2016 through February 2026. Some jurisdictions hadn’t submitted all their claims by then.
$3.22 billion in state budgets and project estimates. We found published figures for 31 states. Some cover one budget year, others cover years of planned work. The map shows those amounts. The tallies can cover the same projects, so adding them could count the same work twice.
National project status · HHS / ASPE
As of February 2026, 23 of 75 projects were fully operational. That’s 30% across new builds and transitional systems, and 10% among new builds.
New builds that reached full operation took 61 months on average.
Read the June 2026 HHS brief · The FAQ uses this same national source.
Every one of these projects was going to be the one that finally worked.
They were all sold the same way: this is enormously hard, it takes years and hundreds of millions, trust the people who’ve done it before. It isn’t a story about bad luck. A system that’s hard, slow, and expensive to build is a system that keeps getting paid to be built — and one a small county or a tribe can never afford. The difficulty is the product.
FreeWIS is the counter-argument you can click. It’s built, it runs on synthetic data, and if compliance is your job you can generate a test caseload’s report and check it yourself. Not “could, if.” Now.
The public record shows billions. Here’s what the map leaves out and where the figures need care.
Every number here is cited to the record. That’s the whole point.
National claims. The HHS / ASPE brief counted $2.28 billion in federal and state claims from 2016 through February 2026 for new CCWIS builds and transitional systems. Actual spending is likely higher because some claims had yet to be submitted.
State figures. The map tallies $3.22 billion across 31 of 52 states and territories tracked. The figures mix single-year and two-year appropriations with multi-year project estimates, so this is a partial view of public budgets. Four entries are flagged. The other entries total about $2.81 billion.
How the figures relate. The national claims and the state budget figures may cover some of the same work. Each stands on its own. State sources appear with the dots. Base map from the U.S. Census Bureau.