Foster Care Agency: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

What this specialty covers

A Foster Care Agency is an agency that provides foster care as defined in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) as "24-hour substitute care for children outside their own homes." Foster care settings include, but are not limited to, nonrelative foster family homes, relative foster homes (whether payments are being made or not), group homes, emergency shelters, residential facilities, and pre-adoptive homes.

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, the sole-proprietor share is the portion of active Foster Care Agency NPI records whose NPPES sole-proprietor field is marked accordingly: 730 records, or 34.6%. This self-reported field is an imperfect proxy for private practice because it does not by itself establish ownership, independence, staffing, or how an agency delivers care.

By state

New NPI registrations by year

Counts reflect the year each NPI was first issued, among records still active today. The final year is partial: this data covers through 2026-01-11.

Data notes

• The sole-proprietor field is self-reported by the provider in NPPES and is an imperfect proxy for private practice.
• A sole-proprietor count shown as <11 is suppressed: the true value is below 11, which could include zero.
• An active NPI record is not necessarily a unique agency, service site, or measure of care capacity.
• The primary taxonomy may not capture every service an organization provides or every agency that provides foster care.
• Providers are counted once, by their primary taxonomy code only.

Source: CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) Data Dissemination file, FOIA-disclosable public data under CMS-6060-N. Aggregated by Hero EMR on 2026-08-03; deactivated NPIs excluded; specialty assigned from the primary taxonomy code (NUCC 25.1). Counts below 11 are suppressed. Individual providers are never published. All provider data pages.

Common questions