Phoenix-area child removals lead America’s largest cities after poverty adjustment, advocacy group’s index finds

Phoenix ranks highest in poverty-adjusted child removals among the nation’s biggest cities

Metropolitan Phoenix has the highest rate of children entering foster care among America’s 10 largest cities when child poverty is taken into account, based on a national “rate-of-removal” index compiled from government child welfare and census poverty data. The index uses Maricopa County as the geographic proxy for Phoenix and compares it with the counties that encompass other major cities.

In its most recent poverty-adjusted table for the largest-city comparison, metropolitan Phoenix recorded 3,478 foster-care entries in state fiscal year 2023, with an impoverished child population of 139,817 in 2022. That yields a rate of 24.9 entries per 1,000 impoverished children—well above the next-highest jurisdictions in the comparison, including Philadelphia County (16.4) and Los Angeles County (16.1) for the years included in the index.

How the index measures removals—and what it does not claim

The metric is built around “entries into foster care” over the course of a year rather than the number of children in care on a given day. It then adjusts for poverty by dividing entries by the estimated number of children living in poverty in each jurisdiction, aiming to make comparisons more meaningful across places with different economic profiles.

The index cautions against reading the figures as a direct measure of maltreatment prevalence. A higher entry rate can reflect a range of factors beyond underlying child safety risk, including local investigative practices, thresholds for removal, access to preventive services, court and legal system dynamics, and the availability of kinship placements and community supports.

Local context: Maricopa County’s scale and system pressures

Maricopa County is Arizona’s largest county and contains Phoenix as well as many surrounding communities. The county’s large population base means its foster-care system processes a high volume of investigations and dependency cases each year. Nationally, the federal foster care reporting system has undergone major changes beginning in federal fiscal year 2023, which affects how some data are collected and compared over time, though annual entry and exit totals remain a central benchmark for tracking system use.

Key takeaways from the 10-city comparison

• Metro Phoenix (Maricopa County) posted the highest poverty-adjusted rate of foster-care entries among the 10 largest-city jurisdictions reviewed.
• Several other large jurisdictions—such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles—also showed elevated poverty-adjusted entry rates, though substantially lower than Maricopa County’s.
• Some large counties, including Harris County (Houston), recorded markedly lower rates in the same comparison, highlighting wide variation in foster-care entry patterns across major metro areas.

The index is intended as a measure of how frequently authorities resort to foster care, not a definitive measure of child maltreatment levels.

Why the ranking matters

Child removal is among the most consequential interventions in the child protection system. The Phoenix-area ranking elevates questions about how often removal is used relative to poverty, how removal decisions intersect with housing and economic instability, and whether preventive services and family supports are reaching at-risk households early enough to reduce the need for foster-care placement while maintaining child safety.