The biggest obstacle between a shelter dog and a foster home usually is not love. It is math. Food, litter, gas to the vet, a crate, the hours: fostering has always quietly assumed a volunteer who can absorb the costs. Los Angeles just decided to stop assuming.
In April 2024, the LA City Council voted 13-0 to move ahead with a pay-to-foster program, directing the Department of Animal Services to evaluate the city’s existing foster operation and tasking the city administrative officer with proposing a monetary stipend for fosters, including a recommended amount and pay structure modeled on programs elsewhere. The idea, championed by Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, chair of the Neighborhoods and Community Enrichment Committee, treats fostering less like charity and more like what it functionally is: critical shelter infrastructure that happens to live in people’s homes.
Hernandez has pointed out that many nonprofits already pay their foster volunteers a stipend, both to compensate the work and to pull more people into the pipeline. The city, in other words, is not inventing something new. It is catching up to what rescue groups figured out years ago.
Why LA needs this
The backdrop is a shelter system running past its limits. Since 2022, more than 1,000 animals have entered LA’s shelter system every month, and hundreds of dogs and cats are euthanized there each month for reasons that often come down to space.
Crowding degrades life for the animals who stay, too. A report from the LA City Controller found 51 dogs in city shelters that had not been walked in a month, kennels left filthy, and some dogs receiving as little as 15 minutes of daily care.
Every animal in a foster home subtracts from that load twice over: one kennel freed for an incoming animal, and one dog or cat getting couch time, decompression, and individual attention that no crowded shelter can provide. Hernandez has called the foster program one of the best tools the city has for getting animals out of the building and into enrichment.
A stipend changes who gets to say yes
The quietly radical part of the motion is who it invites in. Plenty of would-be fosters in LA have the time, the space, and the desire, but not the disposable income to bankroll a temporary pet. A stipend does not make fostering lucrative; it makes it possible. That widens the volunteer pool beyond households wealthy enough to donate the costs, which is exactly the kind of scale a system with four-digit monthly intake needs.
The vote also did not happen in a vacuum. Earlier that same month, the council approved a temporary freeze on issuing new breeding permits, set to hold until shelters fall below 75 percent capacity. And months of pressure from advocates, plus rising public awareness of shelter conditions, had already nearly doubled the volunteer ranks at the Department of Animal Services. Hernandez framed the stipend as one piece of a deliberately multi-pronged strategy to decompress the shelters, and the pieces were starting to stack.
What’s new since this was written
The money conversation around LA’s shelters has only gotten bigger. In mid-2026, Los Angeles Animal Services landed a $14 million infusion, $7 million each from the ASPCA and Best Friends Animal Society, to fund more than 20 staff positions across its six shelters, including expanded adoption and foster teams. That is a meaningful bet by two national organizations that LA’s foster-first direction is the right one.
The overcrowding crisis that prompted the 2024 motion has not been solved, and city budget cycles have been bumpy for the department. But the through-line holds: LA keeps steering resources toward getting animals out of kennels and into homes, whether the ask is a permanent adoption or just a spare room and a few weeks.
