Kinship Care

Federal guidance describes kinship care in three rough categories. Informal kinship care is arranged between a parent and a relative with no agency and no court involved; legal custody stays with the parent, who can take the child back at any time. Voluntary kinship care involves a child welfare agency, but the state does not take legal custody — sometimes a court has placed the child with kin, sometimes the agency arranged it with no court at all. Formal kinship care is the one that looks like foster care: a judge places the child in the legal custody of the state, and the agency then places the child with you.

Those labels describe paperwork, not commitment. The federal agency that publishes them notes in the same document that some organizations have moved away from the terms, because calling one arrangement formal implies the others are less real or less stable. The distinction that matters is narrower and more practical: who holds legal custody, and what that lets you do.

Physical custody is where the child lives. Legal custody is the right to make decisions — enrolling in school, consenting to medical care, signing the permission slip, adding the child to a health plan. Parents hold legal custody unless they hand it over or a court takes it away, so a caregiver can have a child in their home full time and still lack the standing to do any of those things.

Federal guidance is direct about the consequences: kin caregivers in informal arrangements may have trouble enrolling children in school, obtaining health insurance, authorizing medical care, and reaching other benefits, precisely because they do not have legal custody. Most states have power of attorney laws letting a parent delegate some temporary decision-making, and many have educational or health-care consent forms that work when a parent cannot be found. Which instruments exist, what they cover, and how long they last are set state by state.

Federal law directs states to look for relatives before strangers. A state's title IV-E plan must provide that the state considers giving preference to an adult relative over a non-related caregiver when determining placement, so long as the relative meets the state's child protection standards.

There is also a clock. Within 30 days after a child is removed from a parent's custody, the state must exercise due diligence to identify and notify all adult grandparents, all parents of the child's siblings who have legal custody of that sibling, and other adult relatives — including any the parents suggest. The notice has to explain that the child has been removed, describe the options for taking part in the child's care and placement, and set out what becoming a foster family home would require and what supports come with it. The statute carves out an exception where family or domestic violence makes notice inappropriate.

Agencies also run what is often called family finding — deliberate searching for relatives who might not be obvious. If you were contacted out of nowhere by a caseworker about a child you barely knew was in trouble, that is what happened.

For most of the history of federal foster care funding, a relative who wanted the monthly maintenance payment had to meet the same licensing standards as a stranger — including standards with nothing to do with a child's safety, like square footage per bedroom or a particular number of bathrooms. Kin who took a child in on a Tuesday night were measured against a system built for people who spent months preparing.

A rule published on September 28, 2023 and effective November 27, 2023 changed the federal floor. Title IV-E agencies may now adopt licensing or approval standards for relative and kin foster family homes that differ from the standards for non-relative homes. The same rule requires agencies to review foster care maintenance payments periodically to confirm that licensed or approved kin homes receive the same amount a non-kin home would receive for that child.

The rule gives states an option. It does not make them take it, and it does not set what a kin-specific standard looks like. Whether your state has adopted one, and what it requires, is a state question — see your state guide.

The federal preference is not sentimental. HHS's own guidance lists what placement with kin is associated with: less trauma at removal, because children keep connections to school, neighborhood and familiar adults; stronger cultural identity, which is associated with higher self-esteem, better coping and less isolation; more placement stability, with fewer moves between homes; fewer behavioral problems than in non-relative foster care; and a better chance that siblings live together or stay in contact.

That last one carries weight. Sibling relationships are frequently the longest-lasting relationships in a person's life, and they matter more, not less, when a child has been removed from their parents.

In an informal arrangement the parent keeps legal custody and can end the arrangement whenever they choose. That is the defining feature, and it cuts both ways: nothing is taken from the parent, and nothing is given to you.

The practical version of this shows up at a school office or a pediatric front desk. Federal guidance names the recurring obstacles — enrolling the child in school, obtaining health insurance, authorizing medical care — and points to two workarounds that exist in most states: a power of attorney signed by the parent delegating temporary decision-making, and, for situations where the parent cannot be found, educational or health-care consent forms that do not require a parent's signature.

Both are creatures of state law. What they are called, what they cover, whether a school or a clinic must honor them, and how long they last vary. This is one of the clearest cases where a national answer would be wrong for most readers — see your state guide.

When a relative becomes a child's legal guardian, a court transfers legal custody to that relative. The guardian gets both legal and physical custody and the authority to make education, health-care and other decisions. Parental rights are not terminated, and birth parents commonly keep visitation or other rights.

That combination is why guardianship comes up so often in kinship cases. It gives a caregiver the standing they need without severing a child's legal relationship to their parents, and without asking a grandmother to become her grandchild's mother on paper. Where a child is in state custody, guardianship is also a recognized permanency goal, and federal law encourages states to consider a relative rather than a non-relative when choosing a guardian.

The names differ by state — temporary, limited, standby, permanent and probate guardianship all exist, alongside concepts like de facto custody — and so do the procedures, the standard of proof, and whether you will need a lawyer. Your state guide covers the position where PEONY has published one.

Adoption is the permanent option. It requires that a court terminate every parent's rights, or that the parents voluntarily surrender them permanently, and a court must finalize it. Once finalized, the relatives become the child's legal parents and agency involvement generally ends.

Federal guidance is candid that adoption standards are sometimes harder to meet than foster care standards, and that those standards apply even to kin who have already been caring for the child under a foster arrangement. It also flags a trade-off worth knowing before you start: adoption assistance may be available to kin who adopt, but a family that adopts is no longer eligible for the child-only TANF grant.

Our adoption guide covers the process in depth. What differs for kin is mostly the family question rather than the legal one — adoption redraws relationships that already exist, which is a real cost for some families and no cost at all for others.

The Indian Child Welfare Act sets placement preferences that apply in state court proceedings involving an Indian child. In foster care and preadoptive placements, and again in adoptive placements, preference goes first to a member of the child's extended family, absent good cause to the contrary. Tribal members and other Indian families follow.

The statute defines extended family member by the law or custom of the child's tribe. Where tribal law does not define it, the federal definition covers an adult who is the child's grandparent, aunt or uncle, sibling, brother-in-law or sister-in-law, niece or nephew, first or second cousin, or stepparent.

If you are a relative of a child who is or may be a member of a federally recognized tribe, tell the caseworker and the court early. The tribe has its own role in the proceeding, and the preferences are not discretionary courtesies.

Five things drive most kinship outcomes and all five are set by your state: whether fictive kin count as kin at all for benefits and placement; what consent or authorization instruments exist and who must honor them; how guardianship is petitioned, proved and revoked; what a kin foster home must meet to be licensed or approved; and what the monthly payment is under each arrangement.

Anyone giving you a confident national answer on those is guessing. Take your state guide, then take the specific question to a legal aid office or an attorney who does dependency and family law where you live.

Two children can be in the same house, in the same circumstances, and generate very different money depending on whether the home is licensed. Foster care maintenance payments flow to licensed or approved homes. Federal guidance states plainly that kin caregivers in formal arrangements are often not fully licensed, certified or approved, and that as a consequence those families may not have access to monthly foster care maintenance payments or other supports.

The national scale of that: of the 127,449 children in foster care living with kin on September 30, 2024, 55,851 were in unlicensed homes. Among children entering care that year, unlicensed kin placements outnumbered licensed ones — 43,868 to 29,768.

The 2023 federal rule is aimed squarely at this. It lets agencies write kin-specific licensing standards, and it requires that licensed or approved kin homes receive the same maintenance payment a non-kin home would. Whether your state took the option, and what the payment is, is a state fact — see your state guide.

For caregivers in informal arrangements, the child-only Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grant is generally the assistance that is available. A child-only grant counts the needs and income of the child alone, not the caregiver's, which is why nearly all children being raised by a relative qualify on income grounds. A family TANF grant counts the caregiver's income too and is generally larger.

Two limits are worth knowing before you apply. Most states do not let children cared for by fictive kin or family friends access TANF child-only or family grants at all — the definition of relative is a state definition. And child-only grants are typically far smaller than a foster care maintenance payment for the same child.

TANF is a federal block grant administered by states, so the amount, the application, and who counts as a relative are all state-level. Nationally, over half of TANF child-only recipients live with a non-parental caregiver, and among those, roughly 69% live with grandparents.

GAP is the federal program that lets a relative take legal guardianship of a child leaving foster care without losing the monthly payment. It is optional for states and tribes, so start by checking whether your title IV-E agency runs it at all.

Eligibility is narrow and specific. The child must have been eligible for title IV-E foster care maintenance payments for at least six consecutive months while living in the home of the prospective relative guardian, in a home licensed or approved as meeting foster family home requirements. The agency must then determine that returning home and adoption are both inappropriate as permanency options, that the child has a strong attachment to the prospective guardian, and that the guardian has a strong commitment to caring permanently for the child. A child who has turned 14 must be consulted about the arrangement. Siblings placed in the same kinship guardianship arrangement may also be covered. The assistance payment cannot exceed what the foster care maintenance payment would have been.

As of September 2025, 58 title IV-E agencies had approved plan amendments allowing them to claim federal support for guardianship assistance: 43 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and 12 tribes.

Many children being raised by kin qualify for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. In most cases only the child's income is used to determine eligibility, not the caregiver's — which is why a grandparent with a solid retirement income can still have a Medicaid-eligible grandchild in the house.

Every state permits kin caregivers to apply for Medicaid or CHIP on behalf of a child in their care. Neither program has an open enrollment period, so an application can go in at any point in the year rather than waiting for a window.

SNAP counts the whole household's income, and the children in your care can be included in household size when the benefit is calculated. Supplemental Security Income may be available to a child with a disability, and to caregivers who are disabled or aged 65 and over. Where a parent has died or is receiving Social Security disability, a child may qualify for Social Security benefits on that parent's record — worth checking directly with the Social Security Administration rather than assuming.

None of these are kinship programs. They are general benefits that kinship families frequently qualify for and frequently do not claim, usually because nobody told them the child's eligibility is assessed separately from theirs.

For tax year 2026 the federal adoption credit covers qualified adoption expenses up to $17,670 per child, of which up to $5,120 is refundable. The credit begins to phase out at modified adjusted gross income above $265,080 and is fully phased out at $305,080.

One exclusion matters directly to some kinship and blended families: the credit is not available for the expenses of adopting your spouse's child. Adoption assistance payments for a child determined to have special needs are a separate and often larger source of ongoing money, and are handled through the state agency rather than the tax code.

Tax treatment of a specific adoption is a question for a preparer who has handled one. The figures above are the statutory amounts, not advice about your return.

Guardianship petitions, custody actions and adoptions carry filing fees and, in most cases, attorney time. Both are set locally — filing fees by state or county schedule, attorney rates by market — and the fee is usually the smaller number.

Legal aid organizations in many areas handle kinship guardianship, and some kinship navigator programs will connect you to one. Your state guide covers filing costs where PEONY has published them.

The Family and Medical Leave Act defines a son or daughter to include a biological, adopted or foster child, a stepchild, a legal ward, or a child of a person standing in loco parentis. Standing in loco parentis means being in the role of a parent, which the Department of Labor describes as having day-to-day responsibility to care for or financially support a child.

The Department names grandparents and siblings explicitly as people who may stand in loco parentis, and states that no biological or legal relationship is required to be in that role. Its own example: an employee with ongoing responsibility for raising a grandchild may take FMLA leave to care for that child when the child has a serious health condition.

In loco parentis status does not change the rest of the statute. You still need an eligible employer, 12 months of employment, 1,250 hours of service in the preceding 12 months, and a qualifying reason. Confirm your position with HR, and where the stakes are high, with an employment attorney.

FMLA also provides eligible employees up to 12 workweeks of job-protected leave for the placement of a child for foster care and to bond with that child, taken within the 12 months following placement. A formal kinship placement is a foster care placement for this purpose.

Intermittent bonding leave — taking the 12 weeks in blocks rather than continuously — requires the employer's agreement.

Kinship placements arrive with no notice. A call on Thursday, three children on Friday, and a job that expected you Monday. That is a different problem from the one parental leave policies were built for, and most employee handbooks have nothing written about it.

Ask HR directly rather than reading the handbook. Employers increasingly have dependent care benefits, emergency backup care, employee assistance programs and flexible schedule policies that were never labeled as kinship benefits and that nobody thinks to offer. You are also under no obligation to narrate the family circumstances that led here. "I have become responsible for a child and need to talk about leave" is a complete sentence.

Several states run paid family and medical leave programs, and their eligibility rules are often broader than the federal ones — some have no employer-size or tenure threshold. Several also define covered family relationships more broadly than FMLA does, which matters when the child in your home is your grandchild or your niece.

What is available depends entirely on where you work. See your state guide for the position where PEONY has published one.

Federal guidance is unusually plain about this: becoming a kin caregiver can bring anger, sadness, loss and guilt, and it forces a shift from the role of spoiling grandparent or fun older sibling to the parent figure who sets rules and makes decisions. That shift is a loss on both sides, and it happens at the same moment as everything else.

There is also the conversation nobody prepares you for — explaining to a child why they cannot be with their parents, in words that fit their age and do not require them to hold an adult's anger.

In kinship care the child's parent is usually your child, your sibling, or your friend. You are making daily decisions that used to be theirs, often about a situation you have feelings about, and in many cases you are also expected to help sustain their relationship with the child.

That expectation is structural, not incidental. Where a child is in state custody, reunification is the most common plan: it was the permanency plan for 43% of children in foster care on September 30, 2024, and 45% of children who exited care during that year exited to reunification. If your placement is a formal one, the system's default is that the child goes home, and the court may order visits that you are asked to host, supervise, or drive to.

Holding both — advocating for the child, keeping the door open for the parent — is the hardest part of this path for most caregivers, and it is not a sign you are doing it wrong.

Many children in kinship care have experienced trauma before the arrangement began, and removal is itself a loss — of parents, friends, neighborhood, school. Living with kin softens some of that by keeping connections intact, which is a large part of why federal policy prefers it, but it does not erase it.

Early identification and treatment of trauma reduces both short- and long-term effects, so a conversation with a counselor early is worth more than one later. Caregivers are often asked to take part in sessions or to use specific approaches at home. Sibling contact is worth protecting deliberately: where one caregiver cannot take every sibling, keeping them in touch is the thing that preserves what is often the longest relationship in a child's life.

A kinship navigator program helps caregivers find and reach services — health care, financial help, legal aid, emergency assistance — and understand the child welfare and court systems. Some are staffed by peers who have raised relatives' children themselves. The 2018 federal law that funds them lets title IV-E agencies claim 50% federal financial participation for allowable costs, on the condition that the program model has been rated promising, supported or well-supported by the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse.

That evidence condition has kept adoption narrow. ACF's own listing names 11 states and one territory with an approved evidence-based kinship navigator program as of January 2026. Many states run kinship support services outside that federal funding stream, so the absence of an approved program does not mean the absence of help — start with your local child welfare agency.

Caregiver isolation is a documented feature of this path rather than a personal failing. Support groups, respite care, and other caregivers who have been through the same offices are worth pursuing early.

Six things, and it is worth knowing the list because it is shorter than people assume. Federal law directs states to consider preferring an adult relative over a non-relative in placement, and to identify and notify adult relatives within 30 days of a removal. It offers states and tribes the option to run a Guardianship Assistance Program, and offers a 50% match for evidence-based kinship navigator programs. It permits — since November 27, 2023 — kin-specific foster home licensing standards, and requires equal maintenance payments where a kin home is licensed or approved. And through the Indian Child Welfare Act it places extended family first in placement preference for an Indian child.

Congress created the Guardianship Assistance Program and the relative notice requirement in the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. The kinship navigator funding came a decade later in the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018.

For children who are in foster care — including formal kinship placements — federal education law adds protections that many caregivers are never told about. A child in foster care remains in their school of origin for the duration of their time in care unless a best-interest determination says otherwise. Enrollment in a new school must not be denied or delayed because the documents normally required for enrollment have not been provided.

Those requirements apply to all children in foster care enrolled in a state's schools, including in districts that receive no Title I, Part A subgrant. The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services issued updated joint guidance on November 15, 2024.

This is the provision to cite at a school office that wants a birth certificate or a custody order you do not have. It applies to children in foster care; it does not cover informal arrangements, which is one more reason the legal shape of your arrangement matters.

The Supporting Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Act, Public Law 115-196, established a federal Advisory Council to Support Grandparents Raising Grandchildren in July 2018, led by HHS and including the Secretary of Education, the Administration for Community Living, the CDC, SAMHSA and ACF, alongside a grandparent raising a grandchild and an older relative caregiver.

Its job is to identify and disseminate information, resources and best practices, with specific attention to families affected by the opioid crisis and to Native American tribes. It does not administer benefits or create entitlements. Useful as a source; not a place to apply for anything.

Whether fictive kin count as kin for placement and for benefits. Whether the state adopted kin-specific licensing standards, and what they require. The monthly foster care maintenance rate, and the rate for an unlicensed relative if the state pays one at all. Whether the state runs GAP and what the negotiated payment looks like. The TANF child-only grant amount. How guardianship is petitioned and what it takes to undo. Which consent and authorization forms a school or a clinic must honor.

That list is the reason PEONY publishes a state layer. Take the state guide for where the child lives, and where you live if those differ.

The AFCARS figures used throughout this guide come from preliminary federal fiscal year 2024 estimates published as of September 5, 2025. At the time that report was developed, Washington and Wyoming had not submitted data under the current AFCARS reporting rule and are excluded from it.

The Children's Bureau also cautions that living arrangement is among the data elements jurisdictions are still refining under the newer reporting format. The kin share is directionally solid and consistent across years. Treat the precise counts as preliminary.