Are Children in Foster Care Dying at the Same — or Higher — Rate Than Other Kids?
A Data-Driven Breakdown the System Doesn’t Like to Talk About
Every time a tragic child death makes the news, the public hears the same refrain:
“If only the system had intervened sooner.”
“If only the child had been removed.”
“If only CPS had more power.”
But rarely does anyone stop and ask a more uncomfortable, data-driven question:
What happens to children after they are removed?
And how often do children die while in foster care — compared to kids in the general population?
This article breaks down the actual numbers, where they come from, what they do and do not prove, and why the lack of transparent reporting is itself a serious problem.
Step One: Establishing the Baseline — Child Deaths in the United States
To understand whether foster care is safer, we first need a baseline.
The general U.S. child population
~73 million children ages 0–17 nationwide
Annual child deaths (all causes)
~20,000 child deaths per year
Mortality rate (general population)
~27 deaths per 100,000 children
These figures come from CDC mortality tables, which track deaths across all causes (accidents, illness, homicide, suicide, etc.).
This number — ~27 per 100,000 — is the benchmark against which any claim of “greater safety” must be measured.
Step Two: The Foster Care Population — Much Smaller, Much Riskier to Measure
Now compare that to foster care.
Foster care population
~400,000 children per year
(based on HHS AFCARS point-in-time and annual estimates)
This is less than 1% of all U.S. children.
That alone matters, because small populations magnify risk when deaths occur.
Step Three: How Many Children Die While Actively in Foster Care?
Here’s where things get complicated — and where transparency breaks down.
Conservative, defensible estimates show:
~100–200 children die each year while actively placed in foster care
This range comes from:
Federal oversight reporting (GAO)
Aggregated state child fatality review reports
State-level disclosures that track deaths occurring during placement
⚠️ Important: This number reflects deaths while a child is actively in foster care, not:
children who died before removal
children who died after reunification
children who were “known to CPS” but never removed
Those broader categories push totals much higher — but for the sake of intellectual honesty, we are using the most conservative bucket.
Step Four: The Math No One Wants to Show Side-by-Side
Let’s put the two populations next to each other.
General U.S. children
~73,000,000 children
~20,000 deaths/year
➡️ ~27 deaths per 100,000 children
Foster care children
~400,000 children
~100–200 deaths/year
➡️ ~25–50 deaths per 100,000 children
What this means (without spin):
At the low end, foster care mortality appears roughly comparable to the general population
At the high end, foster care mortality is significantly higher
Either way, one conclusion is unavoidable:
Foster care is not demonstrably safer on a population-adjusted basis.
If foster care were clearly safer, we would expect to see dramatically lower mortality rates, not comparable or higher ones.
Why These Numbers Are Probably Undercounted
Even the figures above likely understate the true risk, for several reasons.
1. There is no single national foster-care death registry
The U.S. does not maintain a unified, public database that cleanly tracks:
deaths during foster care
deaths shortly after placement changes
deaths during trial reunification
deaths following emergency removals
Instead, deaths are scattered across:
CPS databases
medical examiner records
child fatality review boards
court files
sealed juvenile records
Fragmentation hides patterns.
2. Classification masks system involvement
Many deaths of children in foster care are categorized as:
“Medical”
“Accidental”
“Undetermined”
Those labels may be medically accurate — but they often exclude scrutiny of placement decisions, supervision failures, or continuity-of-care breakdowns.
A medically fragile infant who dies in care may not be counted as a “foster care death” in the way the public intuitively understands the term.
3. Children in foster care are not “average kids”
This is critical context — and also where bad-faith critics try to shut the conversation down.
Children placed in foster care are disproportionately:
Infants
Prenatally substance-exposed
Medically fragile
Disabled
Traumatized
Subject to frequent placement changes
But here’s the key point the system avoids:
If foster care concentrates the most vulnerable children, then it carries heightened responsibility — not reduced accountability.
You cannot argue both:
“These kids are higher risk”
and
“Deaths in foster care shouldn’t count against the system”
Higher risk demands better outcomes, not lower scrutiny.
Placement Instability: The Quiet Risk Multiplier
Research consistently shows that instability itself increases mortality risk.
Risk rises with:
Multiple placements
Congregate or institutional care
Disrupted medical oversight
Caseworker turnover
Fragmented decision-making
Every move introduces new caregivers, new environments, new gaps.
Yet the child welfare system routinely treats placement churn as an administrative inconvenience — not a life-and-death variable.
The Policy Problem No One Wants to Admit
Public narratives often imply:
“More removals = fewer deaths.”
The data does not support that claim.
If removal alone saved lives, foster care mortality would be:
clearly lower
consistently lower
unambiguously lower
Instead, we see:
comparable rates at best
higher rates at worst
massive gaps in reporting and accountability
Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion:
Removal is an intervention with risk, not a safety guarantee.
Why This Matters for Policy and Public Trust
Using child death statistics to justify:
lower removal thresholds
faster emergency removals
broader surveillance of families
…while refusing to publish transparent foster-care outcome data is not child protection.
It’s policy theater.
Real child safety would require:
full public reporting of deaths in care
standardized national definitions
placement-stability metrics tied to funding
prevention investments that reduce removal in the first place
Bottom Line
Based on the best available data:
Children in foster care experience mortality rates comparable to — and in some cases higher than — the general child population
Foster care is not automatically safer
The system’s inability (or unwillingness) to publish clean, transparent death data is itself a serious accountability failure
Child safety cannot be reduced to “remove faster and ask questions later”
Children don’t need a bigger system.
They need:
stability
support
family preservation where safely possible
and a child welfare apparatus willing to measure its own outcomes honestly
Until that happens, claims of “safety” remain unproven.
SOURCES & DATA REFERENCES
The following high-credibility sources informed this analysis:
Federal Population & Mortality Data
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
U.S. child mortality tables (ages 0–17)
(~20,000 deaths/year; ~27 deaths per 100,000 children)
U.S. Census Bureau / Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics
America’s Children
(~73 million children nationwide)
Foster Care Population Data
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS)
Administration for Children and Families
AFCARS (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System)
(~370,000–400,000 children in foster care annually)
Oversight & Data Integrity
U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)
GAO-11-599 – “Strengthening National Data on Child Fatalities Could Aid in Prevention”
Key findings:
National maltreatment death counts are likely undercounted
State definitions and reporting practices are inconsistent
Federal data lacks completeness and comparability
State Child Fatality Review Data
State Child Fatality Review Boards (various states including AZ, TX, CA, FL, MN, WA)
Public annual reports documenting:
deaths occurring during foster care placement
manner-of-death classification
heavy concentration of fatalities among infants and medically fragile children
Investigative Reporting on Reporting Failures
Illinois Answers Project / Journal Courier
Investigations documenting failure to produce legally required child death and serious injury reports by child welfare agencies over multiple years
Peer-Reviewed Research
JAMA Network Open / PubMed Central
Studies examining foster care entry rates, maltreatment mortality, and state-level reporting variation (2010–2023)
Editorial Note on Methodology
This analysis uses conservative, publicly reported estimates for both populations and intentionally avoids inflating numbers by mixing categories (e.g., “known to CPS” vs. “actively in foster care”). The absence of a unified national foster-care mortality dataset limits precision — a limitation that itself warrants urgent reform.
