This bill creates a new "families with children benefit pilot program" administered by the Department of Commerce that will provide 24 monthly payments of $300 per child to participating families (no more than 1,000 households selected). The department must begin payments no later than January 1, 2027, may contract with third-party vendors for operations, must offer banked and unbanked payment options, and must provide a simple, low-barrier, multilingual application without asking about immigration, citizenship, or place of birth. Qualified applicants beyond the 1,000 may be placed in a control group (up to 1,200 households) that will receive $20 per month for 24 months beginning January 1, 2027. The department may accept gifts, grants, or endowments for the pilot. The act also amends multiple existing laws and definitions. It changes eligibility and resource rules by specifying that cash assistance from the pilot program (and from any guaranteed basic income program, public or private) may not be counted when determining initial or ongoing eligibility or copayments for listed public assistance programs, including early childhood education and assistance, working connections child care, basic food/SNAP, TANF-related programs, and certain disability and medical programs. Working Connections Child Care income eligibility is modified to set initial eligibility at ≤60% of state median income, expand to ≤75% SMI on July 1, 2029, and to ≤85% SMI on July 1, 2031 (subject to appropriation), and the department must adopt implementing rules. The bill reenacts and amends definitions used in indigence and counsel cost statutes and amends child support rules (RCW 26.19.071) to list income inclusions and exclusions (expressly excluding pilot cash assistance from gross income), specify verification requirements, list allowable deductions, and set detailed rules for imputing income. The bill imposes procedural and reporting duties and changes hospital charity care requirements. The Department (as specified in the act) must collect detailed participant and control-group data (demographics, income, assets, health, education, spending, and self-reported changes), make directly collected data accessible to participants, anonymize data before sharing outside contracted entities unless the participant consents, and submit a report to the legislature by December 1, 2029 with specified elements. Hospital-related amendments prohibit certain admission practices, require charity care policies, set income-based discount tiers for charity care at specified federal poverty level thresholds, require language-accessible notices and website materials, limit asset verification and exclusions, and prohibit treating pilot payments as income or assets for charity-care eligibility. Several sections and full amended text for some cited RCWs are not included in the extracted facts, so the exact language of all amendments and any additional provisions in the referenced sections is incomplete.

If enacted, the state would run a time‑limited pilot that pays up to 1,000 Washington households $300 per month per child for 24 months starting no later than January 1, 2027, with up to 1,200 additional qualified applicants placed in a control group receiving $20 per month. Families selected would likely see a predictable boost to household cash flow for two years, and the Department of Commerce would take on the work and costs of outreach, multilingual low‑barrier applications, payments (including for unbanked households), data collection, vendor contracts if used, and a required report to the legislature by December 1, 2029; funding may come in part from gifts, grants, or endowments but overall administrative and payment costs fall to the department. The law also changes how that pilot money is treated by other programs and institutions: state agencies must minimize negative effects on eligibility and benefit amounts for a long list of public assistance programs, working connections child care and early childhood education eligibility rules are adjusted, hospitals must exclude pilot payments from charity‑care income/asset tests and update charity‑care policies and notices, and child support and certain indigence calculations explicitly do not count the pilot cash as income. These changes make it more likely pilot recipients will not lose or have reduced benefits or higher child support because of the payments, but the directive to limit impacts is qualified by the need to comply with federal law, so some implementation details and federal interaction remain uncertain.