While many people dream of building a family or assisting a child through adoption, they are often surprised by the costs involved. We break down typical adoption costs and how these vary across the different pathways to adoption.
What Does It Cost to Adopt?
While adoption can be a challenging and rewarding emotional experience for everyone involved, choosing to adopt is also a serious financial undertaking. Knowing and planning for the cost of an adoption is essential to ensuring you can indeed afford to open your home to a child.
Adoption today includes many possible scenarios, and every case has unique features. That means estimates of the cost of a “typical” adoption can vary widely.
Common Adoption Costs
Adoption expenses can be divided into direct expenses and associated costs.
Direct Expenses
Direct fees and expenses cover the cost of the adoptive process itself, including:
- Attorney fees: Adoption attorneys are essential to negotiating adoption agreements and contracts, amending birth certificates and other documents, conducting negotiations, and handling disagreements or contestations.
- Administrative fees: Court filing, birth certificate processing, and other costs.
- Home studies: In private or foster care adoptions, prospective parents are often required to pay the cost of interviews and home visits to assess their ability to provide and care for a child.
- Background checks: Similarly, prospective parents are sometimes required to pay for background checks or investigations to determine their suitability as adoptive parents.
- Adoption agency fees or costs: In addition to the cost of preparing the home study, adoption agencies may be used to match the adoptive parents with a placement situation, to provide placing parent counseling, to prepare reports to court, to provide post-placement supervisory visits, and other various services.
- Travel and lodging: Adoptive parents may need to travel during an inter-state or international adoption process.
- Medical and living expenses: The placing parent may have medical bills and other living expenses associated with the adoptive placement.
- Marketing and networking costs: Adoptive parents may incur expenses associated with preparing their adoptive parent profile, video and other marketing materials. They also may incur extensive costs involved in networking in order to locate a placement situation.
- Training: Foster care agencies may require prospective parents to receive general parenting skills training as well as specialized instruction to handle the specific health, behavioral, or educational challenges their adopted children might be facing.
Different Routes, Different Costs
Today, the average cost of adopting a child in the U.S. falls between $0 and $75,000. That is a broad range, however, it shows the clear differences between the three main routes to adoption in this country.
These include direct or private parental placements, placements facilitated by non-profit adoption agencies, and adoptions from state foster care systems.
Parental Placements
Parental placements are direct arrangements whereby the placing parent selects and places the child directly with the adoptive parents. These are also sometimes called “independent” or “private” placements and usually are done with the assistance of an adoption attorney. These include:
- Newborn adoptions
- Second-parent or step-parent adoptions
- Adoptions by close relatives
- Adoptions of adult children
According to Colleen M. Quinn, founder of Quinn Law Centers’ Adoption and Surrogacy Law Center, parental placements typically cost $20,000 or more in legal fees and other expenses in-state and $25,000 or more for inter-state adoptions.
Agency Placements
Adoption agencies can assist prospective adoptive parents wanting to adopt either domestically or internationally. These agencies help parents match with potential placing parents, and help navigate the legal process for an agency placement. It is illegal in Virginia to pay any entity other than a licensed adoption agency to match adoptive parents with a placing parent. This is similar to the laws of most other states and adoptive parents need to be very careful about paying unlicensed entities such as facilitators and consultants to find them a matching situation.
Prospective adoptive parents should consult with an attorney before working with agencies, to ensure they are protected including making sure the agency agreement is fair and protects them from risk of losing significant funds should the placement situation fall through. Some agencies provide “shared risk” programs to help with the monetary costs of a failed adoptive placement. The cost of agency placements is typically much greater than the cost of a parental placement given the added administrative and marketing fees incurred by the agency.
Cases differ widely, but Quinn estimates prospective parents could pay anywhere between $25,000 and $75,000 for a domestic agency adoption. International adoptions also vary widely but adoptive parents should expect to pay at least $40,000 in direct costs, Quinn says.
Foster Care
For many prospective parents, adoption from the foster care system can offer a rewarding and far more affordable route. Many states reimburse legal costs associated with foster care adoptions, with Virginia offering up to $2,000 in reimbursements for legal fees and costs for the adoption. Adoptions from foster care are handled by state social services or state-licensed non-profit organizations.
With limited legal costs and reimbursements, overall costs for adoptions from foster care are much lower and many children out of foster care often are placed with subsidy funds to better assist the adopting family. According to Quinn, most adoptions from foster care cost between $0 and $5,000.
Offsetting Adoption Costs
To help offset the high cost of adoption for many ordinary families, the federal government offers a tax credit for adopting a child under the age of 18. This credit for 2023 currently stands at $15,950* per eligible child. You can apply for the credit only once the adoption is finalized, so it’s important to keep track of expenses.
Prospective adoptive parents also can seek grants and loans from bodies like the Family Formation Charitable Trust with AAAA that can help to offset adoption costs.
Quinn Law Centers: Your Adoption Partner
Adopting a child is a major personal and financial commitment. It is critical to consult with an experienced, licensed adoption attorney who can advise and assist you with:
- Providing an overview of the various types of adoptions and entities involved in adoptive placements
- Matching and screening procedures
- Costs and timelines
- Mapping out an adoption plan that meets the adoptive family’s preferences, time commitments and budget
Quinn Law Centers’ Adoption & Surrogacy Law Center was founded by Colleen M. Quinn, a leading expert on Virginia’s evolving family law and a state-licensed adoption attorney. The center offers a full range of adoption services, including placement services and assistance with both close relative and second-parent adoptions.
We are here to help you at every stage of your adoption journey. Contact us to schedule an initial consultation, or click below to learn more about the requirements for adopting a child in Virginia.
*The amount of the tax credit changes each year.