Foster home development: New federal reporting requirements and how the Data Center helps states respond
The Center for State Child Welfare Data delivers foster home reporting infrastructure states can use—quickly, reliably, and at scale.
Building on decades of experience, the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall has engineered a data capture and reporting infrastructure for foster home capacity that enables states to come into federal compliance quickly. The results free agency leaders to focus their time on managing the foster care system rather than managing reporting requirements.
Designed to align with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expectations, the Center’s standardized point-in-time framework produces monthly counts of active foster homes, licensed bed capacity, homes with children placed, unoccupied homes, and average children per home. The reporting also clearly identifies children placed in kinship settings and those placed in group homes or residential care—metrics that are increasingly central to federal oversight, Family First implementation, and state accountability.
What distinguishes this work is the rigor applied to the operational questions leaders face every day. What is the typical length of a foster parent’s tenure? What are the reasons for foster home closure, and are some foster homes more likely to close sooner than others? At an even deeper level, when a child entering care for the first time encounters a foster family welcoming their first foster child, how do those experiences end, and what does that evidence tell us about the experiences of children and families? This is the kind of shared working knowledge state leaders need to improve the system.
Drawing on more than 20 years of experience working with state longitudinal foster home and placement data, our work has already shown that bed capacity is highly dynamic; that a substantial share of licensed homes are unoccupied at any point in time, and that the average foster home is occupied for only about half of its licensed service period. These realities fundamentally reshape how states approach recruitment, retention, placement matching, and efforts to reduce reliance on congregate care.
Said Center director, Fred Wulczyn: “States need both a reporting architecture that meets HHS requirements and an analytic framework that shows how recruitment and retention efforts shape bed capacity over time. The analytical framework is what has been missing from the CFSR all along. As our work clearly demonstrates, when the engineering is done right, outcomes improve.”
By integrating foster home licensure histories with child placement records, the Center for State Child Welfare Data produces reports that are built for federal purposes and decision-ready for state leaders. The result is a single analytic infrastructure that supports transparency, compliance, and continuous improvement—without duplicative reporting burdens.
Meaning from rigor. Impact from evidence.
For more information, contact:
Fred Wulczyn, Director
Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall
fwulczyn@chapinhall.org