The hidden cost of caregiver employees: what the data says

The headline numbers

The most-cited research on caregiving and the workforce comes from the joint AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving Caregiving in the U.S. series. The 2025 edition pegs the working-caregiver population at roughly 21% of U.S. adults — about 1 in 5 employees. Among them, 67% report difficulty balancing work and care responsibilities; 27% reduced hours or went part-time; 16% turned down a promotion; and 13% changed employers because of caregiving demands.¹

Translated to a 500-person organization at an $85,000 average loaded salary, those rates imply approximately 105 caregiver employees, ~17 hours/year of caregiving-driven absences each, and a caregiver-attributable turnover rate roughly 3 percentage points above baseline.³ Even before you price out the productivity drag, the absence-and-replacement math alone runs into mid-six figures annually for a mid-sized org.

What the productivity drag looks like

The cleanest cross-disciplinary number comes from SHRM's Working Caregivers research and Harvard Business School's The Caring Company: caregiver employees lose roughly 8–12% of effective productivity during caregiving periods, depending on the intensity of the situation and the flexibility of the role.²⁵

This isn't presenteeism in the traditional sense. Caregiver employees aren't disengaged or under-performing across the board — they're context-switching during the workday to make provider calls, navigate portals, coordinate scheduling, and field family questions that can't wait. The work that defines their core role still gets done; what suffers is the marginal contribution — the strategic project they would have championed, the new initiative they would have proposed, the mentoring they would have done.

HBS frames this as the foregone capacity dimension of caregiving: the gap between what the employee would otherwise be producing and what they actually produce while managing the logistics of someone else's care. The implication for HR leaders is that traditional productivity metrics undercount the cost — the loss shows up as a discount on growth, not as a measurable drop in current output.

Absenteeism, in concrete terms

AARP/NAC 2025 and Gallup workplace caregiving research converge on approximately 6 absence days per caregiver per year directly attributable to caregiving responsibilities — not counting PTO used for the employee's own purposes that gets implicitly redirected toward caregiving needs.⁴

Six days doesn't sound like much — until you consider that the heaviest absences cluster in acute periods (post-hospitalization, new diagnosis, end-of-life). A caregiver employee might have zero caregiving absences for nine months of the year and then take 8–12 days in a six-week window when something acute happens. From a workforce-planning perspective, this concentration creates more disruption than the average would suggest, because the absences are unpredictable and clustered.

The expensive part: caregiver-driven turnover

The most cited piece of the AARP/NAC 2025 data set is that 13% of working caregivers changed employers because of caregiving demands. The implied baseline is closer to 10% in the broader workforce per SHRM turnover benchmarks, putting the caregiver-driven incremental at roughly 3 percentage points annually.³

Three points sounds small until you cost it. Standard SHRM replacement benchmarks put the loaded cost of a non-executive turnover at 0.5–1.5× annual salary, depending on role complexity. Executive and partner-level replacement runs 2×+ annual salary. Concentrate the caregiver-driven turnover at the wrong end of that range and the math gets sharp fast.

What makes this category particularly expensive is that it concentrates in mid-to-senior employees — the demographic most likely to also be in their peak-caregiving years (parents in their 70s/80s). These are also the employees who are hardest to backfill, longest to onboard, and most expensive to replace.

Role-shrinkage: the under-counted line item

The 16% promotion-decline rate and 27% hours-reduction rate in the AARP/NAC 2025 data are usually treated as soft costs — but they're directly costly to your bench. When a senior IC declines a manager track because of caregiving, you've absorbed two costs: the lost step-up at the senior level (which you might backfill externally at premium) and the lost bench-development. Over a 5-year horizon, the math compounds.

Conservatively, if 30% of caregiver employees experience some form of role-shrinkage (hours reduction, declined advancement, or shift to a lower-responsibility track), and each shrinkage event represents ~10% of one year of loaded salary in foregone capacity, the annualized cost for a 500-person organization with ~100 caregiver employees is in the low-six figures. The actual number is almost certainly higher — this is the conservative way to size it.

The caregiver-as-patient effect

Family caregivers themselves carry measurably elevated health risk. Personify Health's population-health research — led by Dr. Jeff Jacques — documents elevated rates of cardiovascular events, depression, and chronic-condition flare-ups among working caregivers vs matched non-caregivers.⁶ This shows up in your healthcare cost trend without obvious attribution.

We exclude this from the standard cost-to-business calculation because it's hard to defend an exact number, but it's worth knowing the direction: supporting caregiver employees has plausible downstream healthcare-cost benefits that don't appear in a straightforward productivity/turnover model.

What this means for your benefits stack

The pattern across the research is consistent: caregiving is a workforce issue, not a benefits-perk question. The cost is real, sized in the hundreds of thousands to millions annually for mid-sized organizations, and concentrated in the most expensive-to-replace cohorts.

The standard benefits stack — EAP, PTO, FMLA, possibly a Lifestyle Spending Account — addresses the emotional and time-off dimensions but does not address the underlying admin/coordination burden. That gap is where Averyn Care fits, structured to slot in as a co-funded pilot, voluntary benefit, or LSA-eligible option depending on your architecture.

Recommended next steps:

• Run the cost-to-your-business calculator with your specific headcount, average salary, and industry.
• Take the 15-question gap-checklist self-audit to find your highest-impact gaps.
• Read about the three benefit structures — including the HCE/voluntary play.

Sources

1. AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S. 2025. aarp.org. Workforce composition, hours, absence, promotion-decline, and turnover figures for working caregivers.
2. SHRM, The Working Caregiver: Untapped Potential (2024). shrm.org. Productivity-loss range and silent-absorption patterns at the HCE level.
3. SHRM, Cost of Turnover benchmarks. shrm.org. Replacement-cost factors by role band.
4. Gallup, Caregiving and the workforce. gallup.com. Caregiving prevalence and absence data.
5. Harvard Business School — Fuller & Raman, The Caring Company (2019). hbs.edu. Foregone-capacity framing of caregiver productivity loss.
6. Personify Health (Dr. Jeff Jacques), caregiver population-health research. personifyhealth.com. Caregiver-as-patient health risk profile.