The White House said on September 10, 2026 that the federal government will issue refunds of $500 per person to nearly 1 million Americans in 30 states, drawn from what it described as surplus fees collected through the federal health insurance exchange.
Checks will be sent to eligible people beginning in October 2026, according to a fact sheet released by the White House.
The fact sheet describes the total as “hundreds of millions” in what it calls “Obamacare overcharges, collected by the Biden Administration.” It does not state a precise total. The two figures it does give — $500 per person and nearly 1 million recipients — imply a sum on the order of $500 million.
Who the administration says is eligible
Under the terms described in the document, refunds go to people who do not receive premium assistance and who are enrolled in the 30 states that use the federal exchange to run their insurance markets.
The fact sheet lists those states as Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
The document does not say how eligibility will be determined, how recipients will be notified, what legal authority is being used to issue the payments, or whether the refunds are taxable.
What the fees are
Exchange user fees are charges assessed to fund the operations of the federal insurance marketplace. The White House said the previous administration set those fees above what was needed to run the exchange, that insurers passed them on to consumers as higher premiums, and that the result was “a significant surplus of funds that were not used to benefit the Americans who paid these higher premiums.”
Those are characterizations by the White House. The fact sheet provides no figures for the fee rate, the size of the accumulated surplus, or the years over which it was collected.
The document refers to the Affordable Care Act at one point as the “Unaffordable Care Act,” and attributes the higher premiums to what it terms the Biden administration’s “gross mismanagement of Obamacare.”
Other measures cited
The fact sheet situates the refunds within a longer list of administration health actions, all as described by the White House.
It says the administration issued the Marketplace Integrity and Affordability Rule and ended what it called loopholes used by brokers to fraudulently enroll individuals. It says the Working Families Tax Cuts Act permanently instituted eligibility checks for anyone seeking a government-funded subsidy, expanded access to health savings accounts for up to ten million people on Obamacare, and enabled a $50 billion investment in rural healthcare.
On drug pricing, the fact sheet says that as of August 31, 2026, the administration had reached 26 deals with pharmaceutical manufacturers, “covering nearly 90% of the branded drug market.” It says the president signed an executive order in May 2025 directing that U.S. prescription drug prices be brought in line with those paid by similar nations, and an executive order in February 2025 on healthcare pricing information, after which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services increased enforcement against hospitals out of compliance with price transparency rules.
The document also says the president is calling on Congress to enact what it calls the Great Healthcare Plan.
The fact sheet quotes the president as saying: “The government is going to pay the money directly to you… the big insurance companies lose and the people of our country win.” It does not identify the setting or date of those remarks.
Source: White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Announces the Working Families Obamacare Refunds,” released September 10, 2026. The document is an administration fact sheet and states no legal authority, total refund amount, fee schedule, or eligibility verification method; assertions about the cause and size of the fee surplus are the White House’s characterizations.