The Californer - Number of Licensed Foster Homes Down 19% Since 2019

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LOS ANGELES - Californer -- Newly released data compiled and analyzed by The Imprint, the nation's leading news outlet covering child welfare, finds the number of homes available for children and youth in foster care has declined significantly since 2019.

The Imprint's Who Cares Project, which uses a 50-state survey to track foster care capacity in the United States, has been updated with new data from 2025. The survey identified 178,026 licensed foster homes in the country. This is a 9% decrease from the last survey, conducted in 2023, and a 19% drop from 2019, when there were 220,002. The decline is actually higher, given that Virginia did not provide data for the project in 2019.

This is the only state-by-state collection of information about the kinds of homes and placements available in states' foster care systems. The project has been incorporated as a key measurement in A Home for Every Child, the federal government's goal of reaching a 1:1 ratio of homes and foster youth by the year 2028.

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Data from Who Cares show that, in 2025, there was about one licensed foster home for every two children in foster care.

"This project began out of a belief that you cannot discuss the appropriate use of foster care without some context of each state's capacity to care for children in it," said John Kelly, co-executive director of Fostering Media Connections, which publishes The Imprint. "As the current administration focuses its child welfare goals around 'A Home for Every Child,' we hope readers will find it helpful to have up-to-date information about how many foster homes are available, how often states are relying on kinship foster caregivers and more."

There are also fewer youth living in foster care, according to both recent government reports and this project. There were 328,947 youth in foster care in 2024, according to the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. While Who Cares did not capture a number for two states, Michigan and Mississippi, the data collected predicts that the total has declined again in 2025.

Who Cares, which was first published in 2017, is the first public resource of its kind on foster care capacity. To execute this reporting project, The Imprint collects data directly from each state's child welfare agencies, and combines that with federal data through the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). Resources available include national overviews on key indicators regarding how many children are in the foster care system and with whom they reside, a breakdown and profile by state, and featured reporting, commentary and viewpoints from state and national stakeholders in child welfare.

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To access the full Who Cares project, visit FosterCareCapacity.com.

About The Imprint

The Imprint is a daily news publication dedicated to covering the child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health and educational issues faced by children and families.

About Fostering Media Connections

Fostering Media Connections (FMC) is a nonprofit news organization that publishes media and journalism to lead the conversation about children, youth and families in the US. To do this FMC publishes a daily news site, The Imprint, and a print magazine, Fostering Families Today, as well as SafeCamp Audio podcast network, and runs a youth journalism training program called Youth Voices Rising. Learn more at fosteringmediaconnections.org.