Right now, someone on your team is sitting in a meeting while mentally calculating whether their mother can afford another month of in-home care. Someone else is in the parking lot on their lunch break, on hold with Medicare for the third time this week. Another employee — one of your best — is quietly updating their resume because they've concluded that no job is flexible enough to accommodate what their family is going through. You don't know about any of it. That's the problem.

According to the 2025 Caregiving in the U.S. report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, 63 million Americans are now family caregivers — a 45% increase since 2015. Nearly one in four adults in this country is providing ongoing care for someone with a chronic, disabling, or serious health condition. Seven in ten of those caregivers are employed. They are your workforce.

The Scale Employers Don't See

Harvard Business School Professor Joseph Fuller, who has studied this issue extensively through the Managing the Future of Work project, puts it plainly: about 75% of U.S. workers have some form of caregiving responsibility, and 80% of them say it undermines their ability to perform their best at work. Yet more than half of employers don't track caregiving demographics in their workforce at all, and many leaders underestimate or are simply unaware of the impact on performance.

This isn't because employees are hiding it maliciously. They're hiding it strategically. Only 49% of caregivers say their supervisor even knows they are a caregiver, according to AARP's 2025 report. Fuller's research at Harvard confirms why: employees fear that disclosing caregiving responsibilities will hurt their chances for promotion, affect their performance evaluations, or signal that they're not committed. So they absorb the stress silently — and the cost shows up in ways that don't get labeled as "caregiving" on any spreadsheet.

What Caregiving Actually Looks Like

When employers hear "caregiving," many picture someone helping an aging parent with groceries or driving them to a doctor's appointment. The reality is far more involved — and far more disruptive to the workday.

The average family caregiver spends 27 hours per week providing care. Nearly one in four provides 40 or more hours per week — the equivalent of a second full-time job. One-third have been doing this for five years or more, a figure that has increased significantly since the last national survey in 2020.

But the hours of direct care are only part of the picture. What quietly destroys a caregiver's capacity — and their focus at work — is the weight of navigating a system that wasn't designed to be navigated by regular people.

Consider what an employee caring for an aging parent is actually managing:

  • Understanding the difference between Medicare and Medicaid — and what each does and doesn't cover for long-term care
  • Figuring out whether a parent qualifies for Medicaid, which in most states requires spending down assets to near-poverty levels
  • Evaluating whether in-home care, assisted living, memory care, or skilled nursing is the right fit — and understanding that these options can range from roughly $20,000 to over $108,000 per year
  • Coordinating with siblings who may have different opinions, different financial situations, and different levels of involvement
  • Making legal and financial decisions about power of attorney, asset protection, and estate planning — often without any legal training
  • Managing medications, wound care, insurance claims, and hospital discharge plans — tasks that used to be handled by professionals in clinical settings

Two-thirds of family caregivers now help with at least one activity of daily living — bathing, dressing, eating, mobility — and over half are managing complex medical and nursing tasks like administering injections, wound care, or managing feeding tubes. Yet only 11% have received any formal training to prepare them for these responsibilities, according to AARP.

As one caregiver quoted in an AARP report described it: the disease was never the hard part. Navigating the healthcare system was the hard part.

The Financial Pressure Your Employees Carry

Caregiving doesn't just consume time. It consumes money — the employee's money.

AARP reports that family caregivers spend an average of more than $7,200 per year out of their own pocket on caregiving expenses — everything from medical supplies and home modifications to transportation and supplemental care. Nearly 29% of caregivers are part of the "sandwich generation," simultaneously raising children while caring for an aging adult. Among caregivers under 50, that number rises to 47%.

The financial decisions these employees face are staggering in their complexity. Long-term care costs vary wildly by region and care type. Medicaid eligibility rules differ by state and involve income and asset thresholds that change regularly. Long-term care insurance policies — if the family has one — are dense with exclusions, waiting periods, and benefit caps that require careful interpretation. VA benefits exist for eligible veterans but require a separate application process that many families don't know about or find too complex to pursue. Meanwhile, the Family and Medical Leave Act provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave — but for the vast majority of working Americans, taking 12 weeks of zero income simply isn't financially viable.

This isn't a problem that resolves in a week. These are rolling, compounding decisions that stretch across months and years, each one carrying significant financial and emotional consequences for the family.

The Cost to Your Business

The economic impact on employers is not theoretical. The Family Caregiver Alliance estimates that caregiving-related productivity loss costs U.S. businesses between $17.1 billion and $33.6 billion annually. Harvard Business School's research estimates that U.S. businesses incur more than $1 trillion in total turnover-related costs each year, with caregiving as a major driver.

A study published in the journal Value in Health found that nearly one in four employed family caregivers reported either absenteeism or presenteeism over a single one-month period due to caregiving. Absenteeism — missing work entirely — is the visible cost. Presenteeism — being physically at work but mentally managing a caregiving crisis — is the invisible one, and research consistently shows it's far more expensive.

Fuller's 2024 "Healthy Outcomes" report quantified this directly: employer-provided caregiving benefits reduced employee turnover by one to seven percent and absenteeism by 10 to 50 percent among the companies studied, delivering a return on investment of up to 72 percent. His math is straightforward — if caregiving support prevents just five employees from quitting, and those employees earn an average of $80,000 with a replacement cost of 50% of salary, the company saves $200,000. That's from five people.

Care-related issues are now the single most common reason employees leave the workforce, according to Fuller's research through the Harvard Gazette. And when high-potential employees quietly step back from advancement, turn down stretch roles, or leave entirely because caregiving feels incompatible with their job, organizations don't just lose headcount. They lose future leaders.

Why This Problem Is Getting Worse

The demographics are moving in one direction. By 2034, adults 65 and older will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in U.S. history. The ratio of potential family caregivers to those who need care is shrinking. The oldest baby boomers are turning 80, and the need for family caregiving will only intensify. AARP's most recent "Valuing the Invaluable" report, released in 2026, estimates that unpaid family caregivers provided 49.5 billion hours of care in 2024 — valued at over $1 trillion, surpassing what private businesses spent on healthcare and what the nation spent on Medicaid that year.

The direct care workforce — the paid aides and home health workers that families depend on — has a turnover rate between 40% and 60% annually. When families can't find or afford professional help, the burden shifts entirely to family members. Your employees.

This is not a problem that will age out of your workforce. It's a problem that will deepen every year for the foreseeable future.

What Employers Can Do

Fuller's research offers a clear starting point, distilled into practical steps that any organization can begin implementing:

Understand your care demographics. Most companies have no idea how many of their employees are managing caregiving responsibilities. Start asking — in engagement surveys, in stay interviews, in anonymous pulse checks. You can't address what you can't see.

Make caregiving discussable. Employees won't disclose caregiving responsibilities if they believe it will hurt their careers. The culture has to change at the manager level. Train supervisors to ask, without judgment, what's going on in their team members' lives — and to understand that a temporary accommodation is cheaper than a permanent replacement.

Go beyond the EAP. Employee assistance programs are not substitutes for caregiving benefits. Most EAPs provide little more than a phone number to call for general information. What caregivers need is direct access to resources that help them navigate the specific decisions they're facing — care planning, financial guidance, legal questions, and coordination support.

Offer real flexibility. Flexible schedules, remote work options, and compressed workweeks aren't perks for caregivers — they're the minimum infrastructure that allows a skilled employee to keep working while managing a family crisis. For hourly workers, eliminating rigid no-fault absenteeism policies — where three late arrivals in a month result in automatic termination regardless of the reason — can be the difference between retaining and losing experienced staff.

Calculate the real cost of inaction. Companies that cut benefits to reduce costs are looking at the wrong side of the equation. The cost of not offering support — measured in turnover, absenteeism, presenteeism, and lost institutional knowledge — almost always exceeds the cost of providing it. Fuller's data shows that even modest reductions in caregiver-related resignation and absenteeism yield an attractive return on investment.

Provide access to care navigation tools. The complexity of the senior care system is itself a major source of employee stress. Understanding care types, costs, funding options, Medicaid eligibility, and VA benefits requires expertise that most families don't have. Giving employees access to tools that simplify this process — whether through benefits partnerships, care concierge services, or self-service planning platforms — removes a significant source of distraction and anxiety.

The Bigger Picture

There is a generation of employees in your organization right now who are managing something enormous outside of work — often without any training, without sufficient financial resources, and without telling anyone at their job. They are making life-altering decisions about their parents' care while sitting in your conference rooms, answering your customer calls, and meeting your deadlines. Some of them are doing it remarkably well. Many of them are burning out.

The question for employers isn't whether this is happening. It is. The question is whether your organization will be one that sees it, acknowledges it, and builds a response — or one that continues to absorb the cost without ever understanding where it's coming from.

Get Started

Senior Navigator's Guided Care Plan and Cost Estimate are free and require no registration — start immediately and see where things stand. For employers interested in understanding how care navigation tools can support their workforce, Senior Navigator provides a self-service platform that helps employees work through care decisions, costs, and funding options at their own pace — privately, and without pressure. When they're ready to talk to a certified advisor, we're here.