To become a foster parent in Texas you attend a free information meeting, apply through a licensed child-placing agency, complete the state's pre-service training, sit through a home screening with interviews and background checks, and have your home inspected and verified. The state sets the floor for all of it and the agency you choose does the work with you. This post walks those steps in the order DFPS lists them, says what the current rules actually require, and is honest about the parts nobody can promise you.
One thing belongs at the front, because the training says it too. Reunification with a child's own family is the state's first goal in every case. Fostering is how a child is kept safe while that goal is pursued, and a family that starts out fostering should not expect adoption to be the outcome.
How old do you have to be to foster in Texas?
There are three different answers and all of them are real, because they come from three different places. The Chapter 749 minimum standards, which HHSC writes for child-placing agencies, say in section 749.921 that each foster parent must be at least 18 years old. DFPS's own basic requirements for foster and adoptive families say a prospective parent must be at least 21 years of age, financially stable, and a responsible mature adult. An individual agency may ask for more, and Angelheart's own requirements start at 25 years of age and a Texas residency.
So the useful question is not what the state's minimum is. It is what the agency you apply to asks for, because that is the number that decides whether your application goes forward.
Can you foster if you are single, or renting, or working full time?
DFPS states plainly that prospective foster and adoptive parents "may be single or married". Marital status is not a gate at the state level, although an agency may set its own terms, and Angelheart asks that a married applicant has been married at least a year, or divorced or widowed at least a year.
Money is assessed, not measured against a threshold. Section 749.901 requires the agency to discuss the reimbursement process with you and to determine that you "have or have reasonable access to sufficient resources to support the household and all children in care". There is no income figure in the rule, and there is no rule anywhere in the chapter about owning rather than renting your home. What the standards ask about a house is whether it is safe, which is a separate set of sections covered in our post on the Chapter 749 minimum standards.
Working is normal and the screening accounts for it. Section 749.901 requires the agency to document your support systems, including who could step in as a caregiver during an unexpected event such as an illness, a loss of transportation or a death in the family. A family with no answer to that question is the concern, not a family with a job.
What are the steps, in the order DFPS lists them?
DFPS sets out four stages on its steps to become a foster or adoptive parent page, and the agency work sits inside them.
- An information meeting. DFPS describes it as the place you "can discuss the scope and requirements of being a foster or adoptive parent" and says outright that "you do not need an appointment". Its information meetings page lists them by region and states that there is no cost to attend. Where no meeting is held nearby, DFPS says the local office will furnish the information instead.
- Preparation and selection. If you can meet the basic requirements, DFPS says, "you are invited to meet with DFPS staff to decide if fostering or adopting is right for your family". The assessment runs both ways at this stage.
- Training. Pre-service training comes before a child is placed, and DFPS notes that it "provides an opportunity for the family and DFPS to assess whether foster care or adoption is best for the family" and that "the family may withdraw from the meetings at any time".
- A family home study. DFPS describes it as a caseworker visiting your home to discuss "your personal history, family interests and lifestyle, childcare experiences, the types of children you feel would best fit in your home, and your strengths and skills in meeting the children's needs".
Apply through a licensed child-placing agency and the home study is that agency's foster home screening under Chapter 749, which is a longer document than the phrase home study suggests. Angelheart's version of the sequence is written out step by step on our licensing process page.
What training is required before a child can be placed?
Texas requires the National Training and Development Curriculum, and DFPS states that Texas NTDC is a 19 hour pre-service training program for prospective foster and adoptive parents. Its topics include child attachment, child development, separation, loss and grief, trauma-related behaviors, trauma-informed parenting, the effects of abuse and neglect, working as part of the child protection team, maintaining a child's connections with siblings and extended family, and, in DFPS's own wording, "Reunification - the primary permanency planning goal". DFPS also notes that the curriculum includes material for kinship families seeking verification, which matters if you are already caring for a relative child and looking at kinship verification.
On top of NTDC, DFPS lists psychotropic medication training, certification in first aid and infant, child and adult CPR, medical consent training, training on preventing and recognizing sexual abuse and victimization of youth in foster care, and the AS+K? suicide intervention and prevention training.
The minimum standards then set what has to be finished before a child arrives. Under section 749.803, at least one foster parent must complete four hours of general caregiver training, six hours of emergency behavior intervention training, and safe sleeping training if the home will care for a child younger than two. A second foster parent and any other caregiver have 90 days after placement to complete the same training. Under section 749.805, one foster parent must be certified in pediatric first aid and pediatric CPR before the agency issues the verification at all.
What does the agency look at during the screening?
Section 749.901 lists what the agency has to obtain, discuss, assess and document, and the list is personal. It covers the age of every person in the household, basic competency in reading, writing and math or a support system that can assist with it, emotional stability and character and health, motivation and expectations for a child in care, the history and quality of your relationships, financial status, the physical and mental health of everyone living in the home including any substance abuse history, your own values and practices around discipline, your understanding of abuse and neglect, the attitude of the rest of the household to the plan, and your willingness to care for children with challenging behaviors or for a sibling group.
Background checks run alongside it. The agency must obtain criminal history and central registry checks on each prospective foster parent and on anyone 14 years old or older who regularly or frequently stays in the home, not counting children in care. The screening also includes a residence history for the last two years with each full street address, and the agency must ask whether police were called to any of those homes and, if so, obtain the service call information from the law enforcement agency that responded.
Section 749.903 sets the interviews: one individually with each prospective foster parent and with each household member at least three years old, one joint interview with the prospective parents, one in-home interview with everybody present, one with each adult child who no longer lives in the home, and three outside references of which at least one must be from a non-relative.
What happens at verification?
Verification is the agency's decision that the home meets the standards, and section 749.923 sets out what it must do to reach it. The agency obtains a floor plan or photographs of the rooms a child would use and of the outside areas, inspects the home in person against the daily care, discipline and health and safety rules, documents any safety risk it found and how that risk was corrected, obtains the approval of its child placement management staff, and issues a verification certificate. That certificate is posted at the home or kept immediately available, and it carries your name and address, the home's capacity including the ages and sex of the children it may take, and the services the home is verified to provide.
DFPS adds its own conditions for foster homes: adequate sleeping space, no more than 6 children in the home counting your own, a nonphysical discipline policy, fire and health and safety inspections, vaccinated pets, and TB testing as the local health department requires.
What does it cost to get verified?
DFPS states that it "does not charge a home study fee to prospective families", and that the costs a family carries are the ancillary ones. Its published estimates are a fire inspection at $0 to $100 or more depending on the city or county, a health inspection at $0 to $100, an FBI fingerprint at $38.54 per person, CPR and first aid training at $25 to $50 or more per person, a fire extinguisher at $25 to $50 with an annual inspection of $5 to $35, medication lock boxes at $10 to $60, and a TB skin test at $2 to $20 per person. Pet vaccinations, smoke detectors, gun storage, pool safety equipment, copies of records, outlet covers and child safety locks are on the same list.
How long does it take?
Nobody can give you a date, and the rules do not set one. Neither DFPS's Get Started pages nor the Chapter 749 standards put a deadline on verification. What the standards do is fix the order: the screening, the interviews, the background checks, the training and the inspections all have to be complete before a certificate is issued.
What our own licensing process page says is this: "Most families complete the process in a few months, though the timeline depends on training schedules, background check turnaround, and how quickly paperwork is returned." Treat the parts you control as the parts you control, and ask your agency about the rest rather than reading a timeline off anyone's website.
What happens after a child is placed?
The agency stays in the house. Section 749.1105 requires child placement staff to visit at least every three months, inside the home, and within a 12 month period two of those visits must be unannounced, one must have every household member present, and both foster parents must be present together for one visit every six months. Section 749.807 requires the agency to evaluate the home annually against the standards and to train caregivers on anything that evaluation turns up, with at least one hour of annual training a year about treatment services where the home provides them. DFPS's foster parent training page states the annual training expectation as 10 hours for a foster parent caring for a child who receives only child-care services, so 20 hours across a two-parent home, and 25 hours where a child receives treatment services, so 50 hours across the home. Those figures predate the August 2026 rewrite of the chapter, so ask your agency what it currently requires of you.
And the work itself is what DFPS describes in its list of foster parent responsibilities: daily care and nurturing, advocacy at school and in the community, keeping the child's caseworker informed, and making "efforts as team members with children's caseworkers towards reunifying children with their birth families".
The numbers say the same thing. DFPS records that 27,343 Texas children were in its legal responsibility at some point during fiscal year 2025, 13,101 of them age five or younger and 5,113 age 13 to 17. On August 31, 2025, 16,866 children were in substitute care: 6,378 with relatives in kinship care, 5,872 in child-placing agency foster homes and 745 in agency-verified relative foster homes. Of the 9,876 children who left DFPS custody that year, the largest group, 3,223, went home to their families, and another 2,375 went to the custody of relatives without Permanency Care Assistance and 462 with it. There were 1,741 non-relative adoptions and 1,201 relative adoptions.
Where Angelheart fits in
Angelheart is a licensed child-placing agency in Texas contracted with DFPS, with offices in Round Rock, North Richland Hills, Temple and San Antonio, and foster care is one of our three programs alongside kinship care and adoption. The screening and the training and the inspections above are the work we do with a family rather than hand to it, and our published foster parent requirements sit alongside the state standards rather than replacing them.
If you are somewhere between curious and ready, the first step is a conversation and it commits you to nothing. Call the Round Rock office at (512) 310-9857 or send us your information, and we will tell you what the next step looks like for your household before you fill in a single form.