The Coogan account, explained for parents.

Jackie Coogan was the biggest child star of the 1920s — Chaplin’s sidekick in The Kid, millions in the bank by age ten. Then he grew up and discovered his parents had spent basically all of it. Legally! That was allowed then. California’s answer became the Coogan Law, and its big idea still runs the show today: a child performer’s money belongs to the child. In practice, that means a locked trust account in your kid’s name, where the employer deposits 15% of everything they earn — untouchable until they grow up. (Coogan himself later played Uncle Fester on The Addams Family. The money mostly never came back.)

Four states require Coogan-style accounts — California, New York, Louisiana, and New Mexico — and California’s reach is long: if the contract falls under its rules, the production will demand a Coogan account number before your kid works a single day. So open it BEFORE the booking. The entertainment credit unions (SAG-AFTRA Federal Credit Union, Actors Federal Credit Union) do these all day and know the paperwork cold; several regular banks offer them too.³

Good news: the 15% isn’t the whole paycheck — the other 85% arrives normally and can go toward the very real costs of raising a working kid. You administer the trust but can’t spend it; it unlocks when they come of age. One wrinkle: whatever the account EARNS (interest, investment gains) is your kid’s “unearned income,” which is where a thing called the kiddie tax can show up past a threshold.

Surprise: your eight-year-old is a taxpayer. Their acting money is THEIR income — it never goes on your return — and it gets its own return with its own standard deduction. Here’s the fun part: payroll companies withhold taxes from child performers like any employee, and lots of low-earning kids are owed refunds their families never file to collect. Free money, left on the table, every year.

Your job is the paper trail: earnings statements from every production, checking that the Coogan deposits actually equal 15% of gross (verify — mistakes happen), tracking agent and manager commissions, and keeping any 1099 work (content, some print jobs) in its own pile — because the W-2-versus-1099 split matters for kids exactly like it does for grown-up members.