Fostering statistics for England
The national picture for fostering in England, restated with the source and the date on every figure, and with what each figure does not tell you. Figures cover the year to 31 March 2025 and come from the Ofsted fostering collection published on 26 November 2025.
Who families enquire with
In the year to 31 March 2025, 149,795 households made an initial enquiry about fostering in England. Local authorities received 29,985 of those enquiries. Independent fostering agencies (IFAs) received 119,810.
That is 1 enquiry in 5 to a local authority, and 4 in 5 to an IFA.
Local authorities hold the larger share of the households. Of 33,435 mainstream fostering households at 31 March 2025, 18,415 were with a local authority and 15,020 were with an IFA. So local authorities hold 55 percent of the mainstream households and receive 20 percent of the enquiries.
What happens to an enquiry
8,290 applications were received in the year. Local authorities received 3,070 of them and IFAs 5,220.
Set those against the enquiries and the pattern reverses. 10 of every 100 enquiries to a local authority became an application. 4 of every 100 enquiries to an IFA did. An enquiry that reaches a local authority becomes an application more than twice as often as one that reaches an IFA.
4,430 mainstream households joined fostering in the year, including transfers and returns. Local authorities gained 2,060 and IFAs 2,375. Local authorities took almost half of the households joining fostering from 20 percent of the enquiries.
What happens to an application
8,485 applications were completed in the year. 4,060 were approved. 2,805 were withdrawn by the applicant, 1,575 were withdrawn by the service, and 40 were rejected after being presented to panel. 3,055 applications were still in progress at the end of the year.
Applicants who gave a reason for withdrawing mostly gave one of 2. Household circumstances changed during the assessment for 1,005 of them, and fostering was not as the applicant expected for 545. Another 995 gave a reason recorded as other or unknown. Below those sit the assessment process not being as expected, 140, an inability to continue for financial reasons, 110, and concern about the risk of allegations, 10.
Of the applications approved in the year, 2,135 took 180 days or fewer from the start of stage 1 and 3,125 took 240 days or fewer. The second figure contains the first. 940 took longer than 240 days.
Enquiries are rising while households fall
Initial enquiries by year: 160,635 in 2020-21, 138,075 in 2021-22, 125,195 in 2022-23, 131,055 in 2023-24 and 149,795 in 2024-25. Enquiries rose 14 percent in the most recent year.
Households moved the other way. There were 42,190 fostering households at 31 March 2025, 1 percent fewer than a year earlier. 4,690 households deregistered during the year and 4,430 joined, of which 3,050 were new to fostering. The net change was a loss of 255 households.
There were 56,345 approved mainstream foster carers and 69,825 approved mainstream fostering places. Ofsted records 42,015 of those places as filled, 12,080 as vacant and 14,335 as not available. Those 3 figures fall 1,395 short of the total, which is how the collection publishes them.
Kinship care
8,755 households were formal kinship care households at 31 March 2025, 21 percent of all fostering households. The collection counts them. It does not say how a kinship carer found the offer they applied to, which is the same gap it leaves everywhere else.
What these figures do not tell you
They count enquiries as each service records them, and recording practice varies between services. They do not say how a family found the service they enquired with, whether through a search engine, an AI assistant, an advert, a friend or an event. They do not say which enquiries a service never received because a family found somebody else first.
That last gap is the one this site exists to measure. FosterScope measures how findable each fostering service is across Google and AI assistants, and Share of Local Fostering Voice measures what proportion of local fostering results belong to the local authority and its hub rather than to IFAs. Neither is in the national collection, because nothing in the national collection looks at the front door. How we measure sets out both. Our page on foster carer recruitment sets out what to fix first.
Sources
Ofsted, Fostering in England 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025, published 26 November 2025. Household, carer, place and kinship figures from the main findings. Enquiry, application, approval and timescale figures, and the local authority and IFA split on each, from the underlying data file, worksheet Recruitment_retention_2020-2025.
Percentages and ratios on this page are computed from those counts when the page renders, and rounded once. The counts they are computed from are printed beside them so the arithmetic can be checked.
Ofsted rounds every count in this collection to the nearest 5, so figures on this page do not always subtract exactly. We publish them as the collection does rather than adjusting them to agree.
See where you stand
None of the figures above tells a single local authority whether families can find it. The rankings score every fostering service in England the same way, and what we do for a local authority sets out the work that follows. Find your service, then talk to us about what the number means and what we would fix first. The conversation is free and there is no report to buy before it.