Keeping kids safe when their families are in crisis: foster care, kinship care, family reunification, and the people who make those systems work.
Top pay: highest pay, longest training
Child Welfare Agency Director: Leads a county or state agency, or a large nonprofit, responsible for child protection and foster care. Typical pay $130k.
Mid pay: solid pay, degree or apprenticeship
Child Welfare Attorney: Represents children, parents, or the agency in juvenile dependency court cases about abuse and neglect. Typical pay $95k.
Child Welfare Ombudsman: Investigates complaints about how a state's child welfare system treats kids and families. Typical pay $100k.
Child Welfare Supervisor: Supervises a team of caseworkers and signs off on major decisions about children's safety. Typical pay $72k.
Family Preservation Specialist: Works intensively with families in crisis so children can safely stay at home or return home from foster care. Typical pay $60k.
Family Group Decision-Making Facilitator: Runs meetings where relatives, friends, and professionals make a plan together to keep a child safe. Typical pay $58k.
Child Welfare Trainer: Trains new caseworkers and foster parents on safety assessment, trauma, and the law. Typical pay $66k.
Starter: fastest way in
Foster Care Case Manager: Manages the cases of kids in foster care, from visits and school to court reports and finding a permanent home. Typical pay $50k.
Professional / Therapeutic Foster Parent: Cares for foster children with intense medical or emotional needs in their own home, with extra training and pay. Typical pay $30k.
Kinship Navigator: Helps grandparents and other relatives who are suddenly raising a child find money, legal help, and support. Typical pay $46k.
CASA Volunteer Supervisor: Trains and supports CASA volunteers, everyday people appointed by courts to speak up for foster children. Typical pay $48k.
Supervised Visitation Monitor: Supervises court-ordered visits between children and parents to keep them safe. Typical pay $38k.
Child-Focused Adoption Recruiter: Searches for a permanent family for one foster child at a time, often older kids or siblings who have waited years to be adopted. Typical pay $52k.
Interstate Compact (ICPC) Specialist: Handles the legal paperwork when a foster child moves to live with a family in another state, making sure both states approve it. Typical pay $54k.
Child Welfare Parent Partner: A parent who once had children removed by child protective services and got them back, now hired to coach other parents through the system. Typical pay $42k.
Family Finding Specialist: Uses people-search databases and old records to locate grandparents, aunts and other relatives of foster children who might care for them. Typical pay $50k.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.