The vaccine injury fund has money to spare. It doesn't have people.
Summary
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund holds $4.66 billion and is still growing. The court that pays claims out of it is capped at eight special masters by a 1989 law, and petitions have climbed 62% in a decade.
Follow the dollar
Congress built the fund to be self-sustaining: every dose of a routinely recommended childhood vaccine carries a $0.75 excise tax per disease prevented — a flu shot costs $0.75, the three-disease MMR shot costs $2.25 — and the money flows straight into the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund, per KFF's summary of HRSA and Treasury data.
View data as table
| Excise tax on vaccine doses | $131M | revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Investment interest | $169M | revenue |
| Prior-year refunds | $63M | revenue |
| Compensation & administration, FY2025 | $314M | of total outflow |
| Added to reserves | $49M | of total outflow |
In fiscal 2025 the fund took in $363 million — $131 million in excise tax, $169 million in investment interest, $63 million in refunds of prior-year authority — and paid out $314 million in compensation and administrative costs, per KFF's tally. That left $49 million more in reserves at year's end than at the start, pushing the balance to $4.66 billion. Since 1989 the program has made 12,409 compensation payments totaling $4.89 billion. By the fund's own numbers, it is not running out of anything financial.
The bottleneck is people, not money
What the fund can't buy is more judges. Every VICP petition is decided by a "special master" at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act caps that office at eight — a number fixed by statute in 1989 and never revised since, according to the Congressional Research Service.
View data as table
| FY 2015 petitions filed | 803 | CRS IF12213 |
|---|---|---|
| FY 2025 petitions filed | 1,301 | CRS IF12213, +62% over the decade |
Petitions filed climbed from 803 in fiscal 2015 to 1,301 in fiscal 2025 — a 62% increase over a decade, per CRS IF12213 — while the bench deciding them held at eight. 's own case count shows the strain: of 28,673 petitions filed since the program began in 1988, 25,026 have been adjudicated — 12,019 found to merit compensation, 13,007 dismissed — leaving roughly 3,600 petitions still waiting. Congress wrote a 240-day deadline into the law in 1989 to keep cases moving; a Government Accountability Office review found the program instead averaging about 3.5 years per case even in its better years since fiscal 2009 — 15 times the legal target, not because the law changed, but because the docket outgrew the number of people allowed to work it.
The takeaway
- The fund is solvent and growing. A dedicated excise tax pays for itself with room to spare: $49 million was added to reserves in fiscal 2025 alone, on top of a $4.66 billion balance.
- The delay isn't financial, it's structural. Eight special masters — a headcount set by law in 1989 — now face 62% more petitions a year than a decade ago, and cases still take roughly 3.5 years against a 240-day legal target.
- Congress has the money question answered and the people question open. Raising the statutory cap on special masters, per , is one of the reform options now on the table — not raising the tax.
Figures cover fiscal year 2025 (Oct. 1, 2024 – Sept. 30, 2025) unless otherwise noted; the adjudication-time benchmark reflects the agency's most recent dedicated study of case timing, published in 2014 and still cited by Congress's own research service as the baseline for the current backlog.
Sources
- Health Resources and Services Administration — VICP Data & Statistics (Sept. 1, 2025): total petitions filed, adjudicated, compensated, and dismissed since 1988, and total compensation payments since 1989. hrsa.gov
- , Federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Programs: Overview and Current Issues (2026) — trust fund balance, FY2025 revenue and expense breakdown, excise tax structure, and case totals, drawn from and Treasury data. kff.org
- Congressional Research Service, IF12213, The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the Office of Special Masters (updated May 4, 2026) — the statutory cap of eight special masters and FY2015-vs-FY2025 petition filing counts. congress.gov
- Congressional Research Service, LSB11428, Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: The Adjudication of Petitions and the 240-Day Deadline — the 1989 statutory 240-day deadline and its relationship to actual case timing. congress.gov
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, -15-142, Vaccine Injury Compensation: Most Claims Took Multiple Years and Many Were Settled through Negotiation (Nov. 21, 2014) — the roughly 3.5-year average adjudication time benchmark for petitions since fiscal 2009. gao.gov
Comments
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Since 1988, anyone injured by a routinely recommended vaccine has had one required first stop before suing anybody: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault court funded entirely by a tax on the vaccines themselves. It is not short of money. It is short of the people who decide the cases.