Free boundary minimal hypersurfaces are critical points of the area functional in compact manifolds with boundary. In general, a free boundary minimal hypersurface may be improper, i.e., the interior of the hypersurface may touch the boundary of the ambient manifold. In this talk, we will present recent work on compactness and generic finiteness results for improper free boundary minimal hypersurfaces. This is joint work with Xin Zhou.