Respite Care and Short Breaks in Fostering, Explained

Plenty of people would like to foster but cannot give up their job, or are not ready for a child to move in for years. Respite fostering is the option most of them have never heard of. Here is what it is, what it pays, and who it suits.

Please note: this is general information, not personal tax advice. The tax figures below are the qualifying care relief amounts for the 2026/27 tax year and are correct at 15 August 2026. Check your own position against HMRC helpsheet HS236 or speak to an accountant.

What is respite fostering?

Respite fostering is planned short care. A child who usually lives with another foster family, or sometimes with their own family, stays with you for a weekend or a week. Sometimes just the odd night.

Everyone knows about it in advance. It sits in the child’s plan.

You are not a stand-in. You are part of the arrangement.

Who actually comes to stay?

• children in long-term foster homes whose carers have a regular break booked
• disabled children whose local authority has arranged short breaks for them
• brothers and sisters placed apart nearby, sometimes brought back together for a weekend
• teenagers where a planned break takes the heat out of a hard few months

Most respite is the same child, coming back. That matters more than it sounds. A child who has already moved four times does not need a fifth stranger. They need one house where they know which cupboard the cereal is in.

Do you have to be an approved foster carer?

Yes.

Respite is not babysitting and it is not an informal favour. You go the same route as everybody else. An enquiry, then a home visit. Skills to Foster training, a Form F assessment, then fostering panel. Our approval process takes four to six months, and we walk you through every stage of the assessment.

Worth being straight about one thing. Some people hope respite is the light version of fostering. It is not lighter to be assessed for. It is lighter to live with.

Can you do it while working full time?

Yes, and for a lot of people that is the whole appeal.

Most respite falls on weekends and in school holidays. If you work Monday to Friday and there is a spare room sitting empty, respite fits around a job in a way a full-time placement often will not. We have written separately about holding down a job while fostering.

You do still need to be free for the child while they are with you, and to get to supervision sessions and training.

Do respite carers get paid?

Yes. The allowance for the nights a child is with you comes to you, not to their main carer.

At Fostering Hearts, as at August 2026, the rates are:

• £479.50 a week for a child aged 0 to 10
• £507.50 a week for a young person aged 11 or over
• an enhanced fee of roughly £100 to £200 a week more where a child’s needs are higher

How part weeks are worked out varies between agencies, so ask that question early and ask it plainly. It is a reasonable thing to want to know before you commit your weekends. Our page on allowances and pay sets out the full picture.

What about tax?

Foster carers are treated as self-employed and register with HMRC.

Qualifying care relief for 2026/27 gives every fostering household a fixed amount of £20,440 a year, plus a weekly amount for each child: £435 for a child under 11, £515 for a child aged 11 or over. Those figures come from the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group and HMRC’s own helpsheet.

Here is the part that matters for respite. HMRC gives you the full weekly amount for any part week in which you had a child staying. A child who arrives on Friday and goes home Sunday counts as a week.

So a respite carer who has children for thirty separate weekends in a year is counting thirty weekly amounts, not thirty fractions of one. Most respite carers end up paying no tax at all on their fostering income. Run your own numbers, or ask an accountant to.

Do you need a spare room?

For respite, usually yes. A child arriving for the weekend needs a bed that is theirs, not a sofa.

The exception is babies. A baby under two can sleep in a cot in your own room, and we do approve carers for babies only. There is a practical catch in our part of the country. Much of Norfolk, Suffolk and rural Essex has thin bus routes, and if you are collecting a baby from a foster home fifteen miles away on a Friday evening you will need to drive. In Norwich or Ipswich, with buses that turn up, driving matters far less.

Are short breaks for disabled children the same thing?

Not quite. Short breaks for disabled children are a service in their own right, arranged by the local authority.

The Department for Education describes short break carers as approved foster carers who give regular part-time care while the child’s own parents keep day-to-day responsibility for their health and their schooling. The child is not moving in with you. They are visiting, on a rhythm, and their parents stay in charge.

If that is the work you want, say so at the enquiry stage rather than at panel.

What if you already foster and it is you who needs the break?

Then ask. Early, and before you are running on empty.

The Fostering Network puts it well: foster carers may need regular breaks to support them in their role, and often it is these breaks which help maintain placements when they are particularly demanding. Where respite sits in a child’s care plan, the placing local authority is responsible for arranging it.

Some of it never needs to be formal at all. A grandparent who has the children for a night, a friend from a support group whose house the child already knows. The support network around a fostering household does a lot of quiet work, and it gets talked about in your assessment for exactly this reason.

How many children can stay at once?

Schedule 7 of the Children Act 1989 sets the usual fostering limit at three children at any one time. Brothers and sisters can take you past it, and a local authority can grant an exemption where it is right for the children.

Your terms of approval will say what you are approved for, including ages and numbers. Nobody will drop a fourth child on you on a Friday night without that conversation.

Training you will need

Skills to Foster before approval. Then first aid, alongside safeguarding and safer care. There is a health and safety check on your home too.

After approval you evidence the Training, Support and Development Standards within twelve months, which is the timescale in the national minimum standards for fostering services. Family and friends carers get eighteen months. Respite carers do the same standards as everyone else, with your supervising social worker using the work you are already doing as the evidence.

You will not be doing this on your own

Our supervising social workers hold around six families each. That is a deliberately small number, and it is why yours will know the name of the child who stays with you every third weekend.

You get someone on the end of the phone out of hours, every day of the year. You get a contribution towards your council tax as part of the reward package. There is a Youth Council of young people who have written questions that get asked at our fostering panel, and every child we look after carries a pocket-sized card with the numbers to ring if something is worrying them.

Ofsted inspected us in November 2024 and called us a good agency with outstanding leadership and management. One of our carers told the inspectors: “My supervising social worker has been an absolute lifeline for me. I feel so much more confident in my role because of her.”

Frequently asked questions

Can I do respite fostering and nothing else?

Yes. Plenty of our carers are approved for short breaks only and never take a full-time placement. It is a role in its own right, not a trial run.

Will I have the same child each time?

Usually, and that is the aim. Matching a respite carer to one or two children and keeping it steady is better for everyone. It is also the reason we are careful about who we introduce you to.

Do I meet the child before they stay?

Yes. There will be a planning meeting and normally a visit or a tea before the first overnight stay, so nobody arrives at a front door they have never seen.

What if I am not free on a weekend that is asked for?

You say so. Respite is planned around your diary as well as the child’s, usually weeks ahead. Carers going away or having a busy month is normal and expected.

Can respite lead to full-time fostering later?

It often does. Your terms of approval can be changed, and a lot of our long-term carers started with weekends. You can also stay exactly where you are.

Do I need to own my home?

No. Renting is fine as long as your tenancy allows it. You do not need to be married, to have children of your own, or to hold a childcare qualification. You do need to be over 21 with a stable home.