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AFCARS 2023: Early national counts show 175,283 entries, 343,077 in care and 50,193 foster-care adoptions
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Summary
ACF’s dashboard lists 175,283 children entering foster care in FY2023, 343,077 children in care on Sept. 30, and 50,193 exits to adoption from foster care; presenters stressed these are preliminary counts and not directly comparable with earlier AFCARS reports.
The Children’s Bureau’s new AFCARS dashboard reports 175,283 children entering foster care in federal fiscal year 2023, 343,077 children in care on Sept. 30, 2023, and 184,095 children exiting care during the year, of whom 50,193 exited to adoption, the dashboard demonstration showed.
Roger Stanton, a social science research analyst with the Children’s Bureau, walked through the numbers and emphasized they are preliminary and may change as states resubmit data. He explained the dashboard now separates populations formerly combined in older reports: it distinguishes entries, a snapshot of children in care on the last day of the fiscal year, and exits during the fiscal year. Stanton also noted that adoptions in the new dashboard count only adoptions from foster care, excluding private adoptions that previously appeared in AFCARS totals when they involved public funding.
The demonstration highlighted several population and circumstance details: roughly 142,000 children entering care (about 82% of the entries total) had a circumstance classified as child abuse and neglect; about 95,000 entries (55% of entries) included neglect. The dashboard’s cross-tabulation lets users view age-by-race distributions and other demographic breakdowns that were not available in previous AFCARS reports.
On living arrangements, Stanton said about 74,000 children (42% of entries) had a relative or kin as their first living arrangement at entry; of those entries, about 28,000 were in licensed relative/kin homes (about 16% of the total entries). The demonstrators also reported that about 20% of children did not have a permanency plan recorded at entry—an outcome the team expects to change as states improve submissions.
Stanton recommended that users consult the information pages embedded on each tab to understand the definitions, the prioritization scheme for living arrangements, and the caveats for interpreting time-in-care and other metrics.
