Home Visiting Cadence Calculator — NFP, EHS, HFA & PAT Visit Schedules by Stage

What model fidelity actually asks of you

Every evidence-based home visiting model is built on a dose: a number of visits, of a certain length, delivered at a certain spacing, for a certain length of time. The evidence behind the model comes from families who received that dose, which is why funders and model developers ask you to show that the families on your caseload received it too. Fidelity is not paperwork for its own sake — it is the claim that what you delivered resembles what was studied.

The specifics differ sharply between models, and so does how public they are. The Early Head Start home-based option is set out in federal regulation: one visit a week per family, at least an hour and a half long, a minimum of 46 visits a year, plus at least 22 group socializations across the program year. Parents as Teachers publishes annual minimums that vary with family need — at least 12 personal visits a year, or at least 24 where two or more high-needs characteristics are present — across a program of at least two years. Healthy Families America publishes the order of its step-down but keeps the thresholds in a members-only manual, and Nurse-Family Partnership's public material says plainly that visit frequency is flexible, with the detailed schedule licensed to implementing agencies. This tool follows that line: it seeds what is published, links the source, and asks you for the rest.

Why stage transitions get missed

A transition is a date that exists in nobody's calendar. Nothing happens on the day a family becomes eligible to step down to every other week: no alert fires, no visit is cancelled, and the family is usually happy with the rhythm they are in. So the step quietly slides — sometimes by weeks, occasionally by a whole quarter — and the expected-visit count in the funder's report keeps counting at the old rate.

The damage runs both ways. A late step-down spends intensive capacity on a family that no longer needs it, while newly enrolled families wait. A late step-up leaves a family who needed more contact with less. Supervisors catch this at review, months after the fact, when the only options are to explain the gap or to backfill visits into a period that has closed. Working the transition dates out at enrollment — and putting them in a calendar, which is what the export here is for — is the cheapest possible version of this problem.

Planning around family availability

An expected cadence is a floor, not a plan. Families work shifts, move house, spend a fortnight with relatives, and have weeks where a visit is the last thing they can face. A weekly cadence delivered honestly means a bit of slack in the schedule: somewhere to put the visit that was cancelled on the doorstep, and enough room in the month that one missed week does not put the quarter out of fidelity.

In practice that means booking the next visit before you leave the current one, keeping a short list of families who will take a same-week slot when one falls through, and watching the gap between expected and delivered per family rather than per program. If you want to check whether the caseload as a whole fits the week, the caseload capacity calculator turns visits, travel and admin into the hours a week needs, and the free home visiting templates include a family roster and a fidelity tracker to record expected against delivered.

This tool is a planning aid based on the dates and cadences you enter. Model standards change and local, state and funder requirements often sit on top of them — always work from your own program's current guidance. Last reviewed: September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn't this tool fill in a visit schedule for every model?

Because not every model publishes one. The Early Head Start home-based requirement is in federal regulation and the Parents as Teachers minimums are in the model's Essential Requirements, so both are seeded here with a link to the source. Nurse-Family Partnership's public material states that visit frequency is flexible and varies by client, and the detailed visit-to-visit schedule is licensed material for implementing agencies. Healthy Families America publishes the order of its step-down but not how long a family spends at each level. Rather than invent numbers for those, the tool asks you to enter the cadence your program actually works to.

How are visits remaining in the current stage worked out?

From the cadence and the calendar, not from a caseload average. A stage set to a visit every two weeks running for another 84 days gives six more visits; a stage set to a number of visits per year is prorated across the days left in it. Part visits are dropped rather than rounded up, so the figure is what fits before the stage changes, and the projection through the end of the programme adds the same sum across every later stage.

What happens to fidelity when a family cancels or a stage transition is late?

The expected count keeps moving whether or not the visits happen, which is exactly why missed transitions are costly. If a family should have stepped down to monthly two months ago and stayed weekly, the programme has delivered more intensive service than the model calls for; if a step-up was missed, the family got less. Either way, the difference between expected and delivered is what a funder's fidelity report shows, so it is worth catching the transition date before it passes rather than reconstructing it afterwards.