The $1.01 trillion headline
Every two to four years, the AARP Public Policy Institute puts a dollar figure on the work families do without pay. The 2026 edition, Valuing the Invaluable, found that 59 million family caregivers provided 49.5 billion hours of care in 2024 — the equivalent of 23.8 million full-time workers, or roughly 17% of the nation's full-time workforce. The estimated economic value: approximately $1.01 trillion.1
For scale, that figure exceeds the $967 billion private businesses spent on health care in 2024, and it exceeds the $932 billion spent on Medicaid that year.1 The value of a single hour of family caregiving rose from $16.59 to $20.41 over the prior estimate, driven by higher home-care costs, direct-care wages, and minimum-wage increases. If family caregiving were counted as a formal work sector, it would rank among the largest labor forces in the country.
The shape of the load: families now average 27 hours of care per week, and 57% are in high-intensity roles — taking on complex tasks once handled by direct-care and health-care professionals.1 This is a workforce the formal care system depends on but was not designed to support.
A large share of those hours is coordination work
"Caregiving" reads as hands-on help — meals, bathing, transportation. But a large share of those 49.5 billion hours is administrative: the work of keeping a care plan moving across providers, plans, and systems that do not talk to each other. In practice, that means the referral that needs following up, tracking down records from multiple places, and the calls to find out why something that was ordered never showed up.
None of this is clinical. It is project management — performed without training, without dedicated tools, and without a job description. And unlike hands-on care, it can't be contained to evenings and weekends. Provider offices, pharmacies, and home-health teams are reachable during business hours, so the coordination work lands squarely inside the workday.
The system was designed assuming a family member would absorb it
The reason this work falls on families isn't an accident of any one hospital or plan. The assumption is built into the design. Every care handoff, discharge plan, and referral process quietly presumes that someone — unpaid, untrained, and available during business hours — will pick up the loose ends. The discharge instructions list what to do; they don't say who will schedule it, confirm it, or chase it when it stalls.
That assumption held when one parent could step away from the workforce to manage it. It holds less well now, when the person absorbing it is mid-career, often long-distance, and frequently caring for children at the same time. The cost of that assumption hasn't disappeared. It has moved — onto individual households, and into the workday of the people who employ them.
What the $1 trillion figure can't capture
The headline number gives you the scale. What it can't fully capture is the distribution. Most of that total doesn't fall on a team. It falls on one person, indefinitely, with no formal role, no support structure, and no clear way to hand it off. The same report notes that long-term care costs surged from 2019 to 2024 — with home care and assisted living up nearly 50% — outpacing the 22% income growth among adults 65 and older.3 The squeeze keeps more of the work inside the family rather than purchased out.
For an HR or benefits leader, this is the part worth sitting with. The $1 trillion isn't abstract policy data. It's a description of what a meaningful slice of your workforce is doing on top of their job — one person at a time, with no end date.
Why this lands on employers
The people carrying those hours are disproportionately your mid-to-senior employees — the demographic most likely to be in their peak caregiving years. The AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving Caregiving in the U.S. data quantifies what that does at work: 67% of working caregivers report difficulty balancing work and care; 27% reduced hours or went part-time; 16% turned down a promotion; and 13% changed employers because of caregiving demands.2
HR sees the symptoms as absenteeism, presenteeism, and retention risk. The underlying driver is operational: an administrative load that no current benefit was built to carry, surfacing during the workday because that's when the systems are open. The cost concentrates in exactly the cohort that is hardest to backfill and most expensive to replace.
Where this leaves your benefits stack
Most benefits stacks already include something for caregivers — an EAP, a work-life program, maybe a navigation platform. These are good at what they do: counseling, emotional support, resource-finding, and referral. But they support the employee. They don't carry the administrative load attached to the family member the employee is caring for — the records, the scheduling, the referral follow-up, the family updates. That layer is the gap, and it's the one consuming hours every week.
Averyn Care is built to sit in that gap, not to replace what already works. Each family gets a dedicated Care Continuity Partner who coordinates the logistics, navigates the systems, and advocates at the family's direction — the non-clinical follow-through nobody else covers. It's structured to slot in three ways depending on your benefits architecture: a co-funded pilot, a voluntary benefit, or an LSA-eligible option. Medical decisions stay with the family's clinicians; Averyn handles the coordination.
Recommended next steps:
- Run the cost-to-your-business calculator with your headcount, average salary, and industry.
- Take the 15-question benefits-gap self-audit — most stacks score lowest on the admin/coordination layer.
- Read why your EAP already misses this, then see the program overview.
Sources
- AARP Public Policy Institute, Valuing the Invaluable 2026. aarp.org. 59 million family caregivers; 49.5 billion hours of care in 2024; approximately $1.01 trillion in economic value; value exceeds the $967 billion private businesses spent on health care and the $932 billion spent on Medicaid in 2024; average value per caregiving hour rose from $16.59 to $20.41; 27 hours of care per week; 57% in high-intensity roles.
- AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S.. aarp.org. Working-caregiver figures: 67% report difficulty balancing work and care; 27% reduced hours or went part-time; 16% turned down a promotion; 13% changed employers because of caregiving demands.
- AARP Public Policy Institute, long-term care affordability data, as reported in Valuing the Invaluable 2026. aarp.org. Long-term care costs surged from 2019 to 2024, with home care and assisted living up nearly 50%, outpacing the 22% income growth among adults 65 and older.