Children are Languishing in Foster Care and Federal Data is Making it Harder to See

For years, research has shown that children are spending increasing amounts of time in foster care. By the end of FY 2022, children who remained in foster care had already spent an average of 22.5 months in care.(1) Over 200,000 of these children had spent over one year in foster care, and over 70,000 had already spent three or more years in care. These outcomes have drawn understandable scrutiny and criticism, as the child welfare system continues to leave many children without timely access to permanent, stable, and loving homes.

Timely and safe family permanency, including reunification, guardianship, and adoption, is the ultimate goal for all children in foster care. Yet many children remain in care far too long, and some never achieve permanency, eventually aging out of the system. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 was intended to promote timely permanency by directing states to initiate termination of parental rights (TPR) when a child has spent 15 of the last 22 months in foster care. However, states consistently fail to move cases toward permanency within these timelines.(2) Even among children who do exit foster care, permanency is often delayed. In 2024, children exiting foster care had spent an average of 710 days—just under two years—in care across all permanency types.(3) Achieving timely adoptions has also been an increasing challenge for states, with 74% showing declines in performance over time in completing adoptions within 12 to 24 months.(4)

Critical Foster Care Data is Disappearing

Tracking the amount of time children spend in foster care is essential. It is one of the primary ways to maintain public oversight of the most vulnerable children and youth and to hold the government accountable for their care. However, this year, data on how long children are remaining in foster care disappeared from federal reports entirely. This change effectively removes this critical information from public awareness. Those who are familiar with these reports know that a substantial portion of AFCARS data collected each year is not included in federal reporting and is instead located in child-level files and datasets that must be independently requested and analyzed. Under the new reporting structure, this is now also the case for data on how long children remain in foster care. As a result, there is now no widely reported and easily accessible data on how long children remain in foster care. New reports only include the time in care for children who exit foster care (i.e., adoption, reunification, or aging out). While this might seem minor, children who do not exit foster care represent a distinct and particularly vulnerable population, often with greater support needs, making the absence of publicly reported data about their experiences especially concerning. This change poses serious risks for accountability by pushing children who remain in foster care further out of public view, making it more challenging for caring parties to track and call out the failures of our system.

Children Awaiting Adoption

Also missing from this new federal reporting model is a majority of the data that previously reported on children who remain in foster care and are awaiting adoption, which provided key information on over 100,000 children each year. While the Children’s Bureau claims the total number of children awaiting adoption can still be calculated, this is another change that shifts these key issues further out of public view and makes access to critical information more burdensome. Additionally, other important descriptors such as time spent in foster care, age at entry into care, and time since termination of parental rights (TPR) are inaccessible without requesting the datasets directly. When our research team asked the Children's Bureau's data team about these changes, we were informed that the dashboard is considered largely complete, with the possibility of adding time spent from TPR to adoption, and possible plans for future dashboards to include some but not all of the missing data.

Impacts of Languishing in Care

In 2024, 30% of children who exited foster care spent more than two years in foster care—amounting to 64,121 children and youth. Of those, about 35,000 children spent three or more years in care. Research has consistently shown that growing up in a safe and stable family environment is critical for children’s wellbeing. For children who remain in foster care for extended periods, this stability is often lacking, and the consequences can be serious and long lasting. Each additional day that a child spends in foster care reduces the time they have to form strong attachments to permanent, stable family figures and increases the likelihood they will experience another placement change. Over time, this lack of stability can shape a child’s mental health, educational outcomes, and ability to form stable relationships well into adulthood. (5, 6, 7)

Children Aging out of Care

In addition to dismal permanency timelines, more than 15,000 youth age out of foster care each year. Although these youth are technically counted as “exits” in federal data and removed from the count of children remaining in foster care, they do so without ever establishing the lifelong family connections that all children need to thrive. The impacts of aging out of foster care are significant, with research showing that youth who age out experience higher rates of involvement with the criminal justice system, unplanned pregnancy, poverty, unemployment, and housing instability. (8, 9) They are also at greater risk for substance misuse, lower educational achievement and mental health challenges.

Conclusion

The U.S. foster care system is designed to be temporary, providing a safe environment while families stabilize and work toward reunification, or, when this is not possible, it provides a safe place while other permanency paths are established. In practice, many children remain in foster care for years, reflecting persistent failures to achieve timely permanency. Publicly reported adoption and foster care data are vital for tracking progress, identifying unmet needs, and holding systems accountable for keeping children safe. Removing information on how long children remain in foster care weakens transparency and accountability, making it easier for children to languish in foster care without public oversight. NCFA therefore calls on the U.S. Children’s Bureau to once again include this data in annual reporting.

Learn more about national trends in foster care and adoption by reading our breakdown of the latest AFCARS data.