Can a young person stay with you after they turn 18?

Most people ask this question late, usually somewhere around a young person’s seventeenth birthday, when it suddenly occurs to them that the law is about to treat a person they have raised for years as an adult who has to live somewhere else. The answer is yes, they can stay. It is called Staying Put, and it is a right the young person has rather than a favour anyone grants. What almost nobody explains is how much changes underneath a household that looks, from the outside, exactly the same as it did the week before.

Please note: this is general information, not personal financial, tax or legal advice. Allowances are set by each local authority and benefit and tax rules change. Check the current guidance on GOV.UK, read your own agency’s and the local authority’s Staying Put policies, and get individual advice where the money matters to you.

The short answer

A young person who was in foster care immediately before their eighteenth birthday can carry on living with you afterwards. The local authority has a legal duty to monitor that arrangement and to support it, and the support they give you has to include money. The duty runs until the young person turns 21.

What changes is almost everything else. You stop being their foster carer and become their Staying Put carer. The fostering regulations and the National Minimum Standards stop applying to your household in relation to them. The money usually goes down, and part of it now comes from the young person rather than from anyone official. And if other children are still living with you, the person you have been caring for since they were twelve becomes an adult member of a fostering household, with everything that implies.

None of that is a reason not to do it. It is a reason to go into it with your eyes open, which is what the rest of this is for.

What Staying Put actually is in law

Staying Put sits in section 23CZA of the Children Act 1989, inserted by the Children and Families Act 2014. It defines a staying put arrangement as one where a young person and the person who was their foster carer immediately before they left care carry on living together. Where such an arrangement exists, the local authority must monitor it, and must provide advice, assistance and support to both the young person and the former foster carer to help them keep it going. The section is explicit that the support given to the carer has to include financial support.

Two limits are worth knowing. The duty stops at 21, and it does not apply if the authority takes the view that the arrangement would be inconsistent with the young person’s welfare. Beyond that, the law is on the side of the household staying together.

Who is eligible

• The young person must have been in care for at least 13 weeks after their fourteenth birthday, and must have been in care immediately before turning 18.
• They must have been living with you as a foster carer at that point. Staying Put is about continuing a home that already exists, not creating a new one.
• Both of you have to want it. Nobody can be required to offer Staying Put and nobody can be required to accept it.
• It should be planned rather than improvised, and written into the young person’s Pathway Plan well before the birthday.

How often it actually happens

More often than people expect. The Department for Education’s figures for the year ending 31 March 2025 show that 62% of eighteen year olds who were in foster care and left care on their eighteenth birthday were still living with their former foster carers three months later. That proportion was unchanged on the previous year. Among nineteen and twenty year olds it was 33%, up from 32%.

Read those two numbers together and you get the honest shape of Staying Put. It is normal at 18 and it thins out considerably after that. Some of that is young people moving on because they are ready, which is the point of the whole thing. Some of it is arrangements that were never properly planned or funded.

What changes on the birthday

This is the part that catches people out, because from the inside nothing feels different. The government’s Staying Put guidance is blunt about the legal position: after the eighteenth birthday the basis on which the young person occupies your home changes, and they become an “excluded licensee”, which in plain terms means a lodger who is not protected by the usual tenancy rules.

Alongside that:

• The fostering rulebook stops applying to them. The regulations, statutory guidance and National Minimum Standards that govern fostering do not cover a Staying Put arrangement. Your supervision, your recording duties and your annual review continue for any children you still foster, but not for this young adult.
• Your title changes. You are their Staying Put carer. If you also foster, you are both things at once, under two different sets of rules.
• They may need a DBS check. The guidance is clear that a young person who stays on past 18 becomes an adult member of the household and will need a valid check where foster children are also living there. Fosterline puts it the same way: the young person would need to agree to DBS checks as a household member.
• Your terms of approval may be revised. Fosterline notes that a Staying Put arrangement can affect continued fostering, for example by reducing the number of children you are approved to care for. The bedroom they sleep in is no longer a bedroom available to a child.

That last point deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the one that quietly costs households money and nobody mentions it at the planning meeting. Approval terms are set and changed through your agency’s panel, so if you are considering Staying Put, ask early what it will do to yours. Our piece on the different types of foster care explains how approval terms shape what you can offer.

The money, honestly

There is no national Staying Put rate. The allowance is set by the young person’s local authority, not by the fostering agency, and it is usually lower than the fee you were receiving as their foster carer. For comparison, South Coast pays £479.50 a week for a child aged 0 to 10 and £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, combining an allowance for the child’s care with a professional fee for your role. A Staying Put allowance will not generally match that, and it is fair to ask for the figure in writing before you commit.

How it reaches you depends on who is administering the arrangement. There are three common models:

• The local authority works with you directly, pays you and supports the arrangement.
• Your fostering agency carries on paying you, but the support comes from the local authority.
• Your fostering agency carries on paying you and supporting you.

The second part of the money is new, and it is the part carers find strangest. The young person is expected to contribute towards rent and household costs out of their own income or benefits. The guidance is specific that the rent has to be a real liability, enforceable and set on a commercial basis, and it recommends a letter or licence from you setting out the total broken down into rent, support, utilities and food. If the young person’s earnings will not stretch to it and they are not entitled to Universal Credit, the local authority will usually cover the rent instead.

Three more things that are easy to miss:

• Payments to you are disregarded for your own benefits. Money paid to a Staying Put carer by children’s services under section 23C is ignored when calculating entitlement to means-tested benefits.
• Qualifying Care Relief still covers you. HMRC’s helpsheet is titled for foster carers, adult placement carers, kinship carers and staying put carers, so the relief that keeps most fostering income out of tax follows you into the arrangement. We explain how it works in our guide to whether foster carers pay tax, and the thresholds change each year, so use the current HMRC figures.
• University and training can reduce what you receive. If the young person is away for long stretches at university, on a course or in the armed forces, the income attached to them may drop while they are gone, even though their room is still theirs. Ask how your local authority handles term time and holidays before the offer letter arrives, not after.

If you want the broader picture of how a fostering household holds together financially, our fostering payments and allowances page sets out what the weekly figures cover and what to ask about.

The Living Together Agreement

Every Staying Put arrangement should have one, drawn up between you, the young person and the local authority. It replaces the plan you used to work to, and its job is to write down the things that were previously assumed. A good one covers:

• The young person’s responsibilities, such as keeping their room and its furniture in decent order.
• Your responsibilities, such as telling the relevant service if they are away or cannot be reached.
• The house rules you have agreed between you, which might cover smoking, or whether visitors can stay over.
• The independence skills you will be helping them build.
• The financial arrangement, in full, including what they pay and when.

Writing down house rules for someone you have parented for years feels absurd until the first disagreement, at which point it is the single most useful document in the house. It is reviewed alongside the Pathway Plan, usually every six months and in some areas annually, and it can be changed. The review is also where you say that something is not working, which is much easier to do against a written agreement than out of the blue.

The independence skills line is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a form-filling exercise. Our article on helping young people build life skills covers the practical end of it.

The timeline, and why 16 matters

Staying Put arrangements that work are the ones that were discussed years before they started. The rough shape is this:

• Before 16, ideally earlier. Start talking about what the young person wants to do. If you would be willing to offer Staying Put, say so, so the option is real in their head rather than theoretical.
• By 16. The local authority must have a Pathway Plan in place, setting out the young person’s aspirations, their accommodation plan and the support they will need. A Personal Adviser is appointed at this point and works alongside their social worker.
• Between 16 and about 17 and a half. Staying Put planning meetings happen and the Living Together Agreement is drafted and agreed.
• At 18. The arrangement begins, the paperwork converts, and any DBS checks are done.
• Every six months after that. The Personal Adviser reviews the Pathway Plan with both of you and the Living Together Agreement is looked at again.

One piece of practical wisdom from the sector: have the early conversations separately. You talk to your supervising social worker about whether you could do it, while the young person talks to theirs about what they want. That way neither of you is answering in front of the other, and nobody agrees to something out of loyalty.

What the rules ask of your agency

Two of the National Minimum Standards speak directly to this, and they are worth knowing because most carers have never been shown them.

Standard 12.4 says that a fostering service “has a policy and practical arrangements which enable children to remain with their foster carer(s) into legal adulthood, for example so that s/he may develop appropriate life skills before being required to move to more independent accommodation.”

Standard 28.4 says that the service “advises foster carers of financial and other support that is available to foster carers where a child remains with them after they reach the age of 18 or where they care for/provide a home for a child and their parent(s).”

Put plainly, your agency is expected to have thought about this before you ask, and to tell you what the money looks like. If an agency cannot answer either question when you raise it, that tells you something useful about how the arrangement would be supported later.

Can you carry on fostering at the same time?

Usually yes, and plenty of households do. The practical questions are about space and approval rather than permission. If the young person’s room is now permanently theirs, your approved capacity may need to change to reflect it. If a child comes to live with you, the young person is an adult in the household and will need the checks that go with that. Some carers find the combination works well, with the older one modelling something useful for a younger arrival. Others decide to pause fostering for a couple of years and come back to it.

It is also worth being realistic about the alternative. Fosterline notes that a carer who cannot continue fostering may be asked to resign from their service, so if you want to keep your approval alive while a Staying Put arrangement runs, say so early and get it agreed rather than assuming it will look after itself. Our page on the support we give our foster carers is the place to start that conversation with us.

How a Staying Put arrangement ends

There are four ordinary endings:

• The young person turns 21, which is where the arrangement naturally stops. Support from their Personal Adviser continues to 25.
• They decide to move on earlier, in which case the local authority helps them find somewhere.
• The local authority ends it because it is not working for the young person.
• You end it, because of space, health, money or because the household has stopped functioning.

Because the young person is an excluded licensee rather than a tenant, you can ask them to leave with reasonable notice, and the guidance accepts that in extreme circumstances very short notice may be reasonable. That is a legal fact rather than a recommendation. In practice, ending an arrangement well means using the review, involving the Personal Adviser and giving everyone time.

One genuine trap: the benefits disregard on the payments you receive runs only until the young person first leaves the arrangement. If they leave and later come back, the money is treated differently. Check your position before agreeing to a return.

If Staying Put is not the right answer

Sometimes it is not, and that is a legitimate outcome rather than a failure. A young person may want their own front door, or the household may simply not have the room. The alternatives are supported living and Staying Close, which provide move-on accommodation together with practical and emotional support for young people who cannot or do not want to remain with their foster carer.

Staying Close has recently been strengthened. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 places it on a statutory footing, requiring local authorities to assess whether a young person up to the age of 25 needs that support and to provide it where their welfare requires it, and to publish clear information about the help available. It is a meaningful change for young people who leave foster care without a Staying Put arrangement.

Questions worth asking before you say yes

• What is the weekly Staying Put allowance, in pounds, and who pays it?
• What is the young person expected to contribute, and what happens if they cannot?
• Which of the three funding models applies here, and who do I ring when something goes wrong?
• What happens to my terms of approval, and can I keep fostering?
• What happens to the money if they go away to study or train?
• What notice applies on each side if the arrangement has to end?

Ask them in writing and keep the answers. None of these are awkward questions. They are the questions a well-run service expects.

You won’t have to do this alone

Staying Put is one of the quietest good things in the care system. A young person who would otherwise be packing a bag on a birthday gets to leave home the way most people do, gradually, with somewhere to come back to at Christmas. For the household, it is the difference between an ending and a change of shape.

South Coast Fostering is a small agency covering Southern England, and we have been doing this for over 25 years. We will talk through what an arrangement would mean for your household before anyone asks you to decide, including the parts that are inconvenient. If you are fostering elsewhere and cannot get a straight answer about Staying Put, that is worth a conversation too. And if you are only at the stage of wondering whether you could foster a teenager at all, that is a good place to start from.

Frequently asked questions

Is Staying Put the same as fostering?

No. Once the young person turns 18 the fostering regulations, statutory guidance and National Minimum Standards no longer apply to the arrangement. You become a Staying Put carer rather than their foster carer, the young person becomes a lodger in legal terms, and the money is set by the local authority under a different part of the Children Act. The home is the same. The framework around it is not.

How long can a young person stay?

The local authority’s duty to support the arrangement runs until they are 21. After that the arrangement can continue privately if you both want it to, and the young person’s Personal Adviser can support them up to the age of 25.

Will I be paid the same as I was for fostering?

Almost certainly not. The Staying Put allowance is set by the young person’s local authority and is usually lower than a fostering fee, with the young person expected to contribute towards rent and household costs from their own income or benefits. Get the figure in writing before you agree, and ask what happens if their circumstances change.

Can I foster another child while a young person stays with me?

Often yes, but it depends on space and on your terms of approval, which may need to be revised. The young person will also need a DBS check as an adult member of a fostering household. Raise it with your supervising social worker well before the eighteenth birthday so it can be planned rather than rushed.

What if the young person wants to go to university?

They can, and keeping their room is often the point. Be aware that the money attached to the arrangement may reduce while they are away during term time, so ask your local authority how it handles time away at university or on a training course before you agree the finances.

What if we decide it is not working?

Either side can end the arrangement. The six-monthly review of the Pathway Plan and the Living Together Agreement is the right place to raise difficulties early, and the young person’s Personal Adviser and the local authority are there to help find the next step. Ending an arrangement is not the same as it having failed.