Find Adult Family Homes Near You

Washington and Oregon call them adult family homes, and the model is the most intimate small senior care setting in the country. A Washington adult family home is licensed for up to six residents. Oregon's equivalent category, the adult foster home, is capped at five. These are real houses in real neighborhoods, often owned and operated by the caregivers themselves, who may live on site with their families.

The appeal is immediate. A resident joins what amounts to an extended family. Meals are shared at one table. A single provider, sometimes with one or two additional staff, handles everything from medication management to laundry to conversation over coffee at 7 a.m. Because the resident population is so small, every care plan is genuinely individual. A resident with early dementia can be gently redirected without disrupting a room of forty other people. A resident who prefers quiet mornings can have them.

Washington has one of the most established adult family home networks in the country. The state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) licenses nearly 3,000 adult family homes, and many accept Medicaid under the COPES waiver program, making them among the most affordable licensed senior care options in the state for Medicaid-eligible older adults. Oregon's adult foster home program, administered by the Department of Human Services, Aging and People with Disabilities, serves a similar role with a five-resident maximum.

For families, the adult family home model makes sense when the concern is loneliness, when a larger facility feels overwhelming, or when an older parent spent decades living in a quiet home and dreads the idea of moving into an institutional setting. The trade-offs are real: fewer on-site amenities, no gym or salon, and a harder time finding an opening, because small homes tend to have long waitlists. But for the right resident, the adult family home is the closest thing to continuing to live at home with professional care.