Households are the one part of Lazarus you never build by hand — they assemble themselves. Understanding how that works will save you confusion the first time a household merges, splits, or renames itself on its own. This guide explains what a household is, how guardianships drive it, and what you'll see on the Household tab.
A household is simply the group of people who belong to the same family: the guardians and the students they're responsible for. Lazarus uses it to keep a family's records together and to attach tuition and billing to the right people. A household can hold any number of guardians and students — one parent and one child, two parents and three children, a grandparent and a grandchild, and so on.
The link between a guardian and a student is called a guardianship, and it carries a relationship type. The available relationships are:
Every guardianship connects one guardian to one student. A student can have several guardians (a mother and a father, say), and a guardian can be tied to several students (siblings). These connections are what Lazarus reads to decide who belongs in which household.
Whenever you connect a guardian and a student — whether through an accepted application or by adding and linking them yourself — Lazarus makes sure the two end up in the same household. It handles this for you:
The result is that a family always lands in a single household without you ever creating one manually. You manage the people and the relationships between them; the grouping takes care of itself.
A household names itself, so you don't have to. Lazarus builds the name from the guardians' last names, combining them when they differ (for example, a household with a Smith parent and a Jones parent becomes Smith / Jones). If a household has no guardians yet, it falls back to the students' last names. Every time the membership changes, the name is regenerated to stay accurate. In the detail panel you'll see this presented as, for example, The Smith Household.
Just as households merge when families connect, they split when a connection is removed. If you remove the guardianship that was holding part of a household together, Lazarus checks whether everyone remaining is still connected. If the household has effectively become two separate families, it splits them into separate households — keeping the larger group in place and moving the rest into a new household of their own. And if a student loses their last guardian, they're removed from the household; an empty household is cleaned up automatically.
You rarely need to think about this — it's what keeps the directory honest as families change — but it explains why removing a relationship can reshape a household.
When you select a person on the Everyone tab, their detail panel includes a Household tab (marked with a home icon) that shows the whole family in one place:
The student status shown here follows a simple priority: if the student has an enrollment for the selected year, that enrollment's status wins (Active, Enrolled, Waitlisted, and so on); if not, their application status is used instead (Accepted, Applied, Rejected, Withdrawn, Draft); and if there's neither, the student shows as Inactive for that year.
Tip: If a family member is missing from a household, the fix is almost always a missing guardianship. Add the relationship between the guardian and the student, and Lazarus will pull them into the same household automatically.
With the household model clear, the next guide opens up the detail panel and everything you can do on an individual person's record.