AbstractThe decisions social workers make are often under the spotlight. Increasingly professional decision‐making is seen not as a stand‐alone single act but a continuum shaped by a range of factors making up a decision ecology. Social work has been described as an invisible trade, and one of its most private and invisible arenas is the home visit. Despite being a long established core activity in social work and an important site for social work judgement and decision‐making, the home visit has often been taken for granted, leaving it under‐researched and under‐theorized. We use a case study of a visit drawn from one of the authors' practice to examine the range of ecological variables that shaped the encounter. The intention is not to produce a generalized prescription for best practice but to provide a detailed exploration of a piece of practice and contribute to the development of practice‐based theory about social work decision‐making and home visiting.