AFCARS data study · FY2022
According to ACF's FY2022 AFCARS workbooks, this page is a readable reference for the counts and discharge outcomes behind PlainFoster's state pages. The public state rows cover the 50 states and D.C.; federal national totals include Puerto Rico and are labeled separately.
Stock vs exit-path leaders, FY2022
366,394 children sat in foster care across the 50 states and D.C. on September 30. California carried the largest stock (45,924), Washington led reunification exits at 67.0%, and Maine led adoption exits at 41.8% - three jurisdictions on three different denominators.
September 30 counts are a stock; reunification, adoption, and aging-out rates are shares of that fiscal year's exits. PlainFoster does not license, place, or advise on individual cases.
The largest caseload, the highest reunification share, and the highest adoption share rarely belong to the same jurisdiction. Each card links to the state profile and names the denominator.
Do not interchange the public jurisdiction table with the federal headline total. Charts on this page label which population each figure uses.
The 50-state-and-D.C. count peaked at 436,556 in FY2017. FY2022 was 16.1% lower - a stock change across published jurisdiction rows, not a live caseload tracker.
Federal exit mix FY2022: 45.2% reunification, 26.3% adoption, 9.2% aging out (national aggregate).
All counts on this page are summed and computed live from PlainFoster's own AFCARS-sourced database, not hand-typed. The 50-state-and-D.C. total is a row-level sum of each state's September 30 in-care count for FY2022; the national aggregate is the separate federal ACF figure, which additionally includes Puerto Rico -- the two are never blended into one number.
The decade-trend "16.1% lower" figure is (peak year's total − latest year's total) ÷ peak year's total, rounded to one decimal. California's 12.5% share is California's in-care count ÷ the 50-state-and-D.C. sum, same rounding.
Reunification, adoption, and aging-out rates use exits (not the September 30 stock) as their denominator, and state-level leader boards only rank a state once it clears a 500-exit floor for that fiscal year -- documented on the methodology page alongside the full source-to-page pipeline.
Start with the count and the year. A large state will often have a large caseload, which does not by itself describe care quality or the experience of any child.
For outcome rates, compare jurisdictions with enough exits to make the denominator meaningful. PlainFoster uses a 500-exit floor for rate rankings and shows the exit count alongside each leader.
These are published federal fiscal-year figures, not a live caseload tracker. The methodology explains the three related populations in the source material and why national totals can differ from the public state table.
According to the U.S. Children's Bureau (Administration for Children and Families), foster-care counts and discharge outcomes are published in AFCARS workbooks and jurisdiction reports. Every figure on PlainFoster is rebuilt from those federal tables; no number is typed in by an editor. This study distinguishes the 50-state-and-D.C. public rows from ACF's national aggregate, which includes Puerto Rico. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of 2026-07-30. AFCARS figures are federal fiscal-year foster-care counts and discharge rates from jurisdiction reports - not child-welfare quality rankings, court-performance scores, case-level advice, or real-time caseload status.