HHS Announces Upcoming Release of New Interactive Dashboard with Most-Recent Foster Care Data

Today, as part of National Foster Care Month, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the upcoming release of a new interactive dashboard to share foster care data with stakeholders and the public in a transparent and user-friendly way. The dashboard will also include the release of the FY 2023 Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting System (AFCARS) data. This data indicates a steady decrease in the number of children entering and currently in foster care. The number of children entering foster care in FY 2023 totaled 175,283, a decrease of 6.1 percent from FY 2022. The number of children in foster care on the last day of FY 2023 totaled 343,077, a decrease of 6.9 percent from FY 2022.

"Today's announcement and this new dashboard demonstrate ACF's commitment to radical transparency and providing excellent customer service to our grant recipients and to the American public," said Andrew Gradison, Acting Assistant Secretary for ACF. "By making this data more accessible in a user-friendly format, we are collectively better able to understand the foster care landscape and what our children need."

Rather than a static PDF, the AFCARS Report (TAR) has been transformed into an interactive dashboard. The newly unveiled AFCARS Dashboard is an enhanced version of the previous TAR and will be revealed in a webinar on May 13 (see below). The Dashboard is the first public reporting on the new AFCARS data that are based on the final rule published May 2020 (85 FR 28410 ). The data requirements changed substantially with the AFCARS 2020 final rule and the new data requirements allow for a more granular and dynamic display of foster care data. The dashboard features graphical displays and interactive elements that allow a user to explore the data of most interest to them. The Dashboard presents cross-tabulations of foster care characteristics with child demographics, providing a level of detail in the summary statistics not included in the previous versions. Additionally, features of the new AFCARS 2020 data allow for summaries of foster care characteristics that could not be determined prior to the AFCARS 2020 data.

"We continue to see a decline in children entering care," said Gradison. "But we will celebrate reduced numbers of children in foster care only when we see corresponding indicators of improved child safety. The only true measure of success is fewer children harmed by abuse and neglect."

Historically, the TAR has been released in November and reported on data from the previous year. Due to the efficiencies gained by using a new analytical method, the Dashboard will now be updated with prior year data in May of the subsequent fiscal year, six months earlier than our previous practice allowed.

On May 13, 2025, at 12:15 p.m. ET, ACF will host an instructional webinar to help users navigate the new AFCARS Dashboard data. Attendees at the webinar will be given first access to the dashboard, and the dashboard will go live hereon May 13.

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