The Financial Cost of Caregiving — With the Method Attached

Money actually spent: the out-of-pocket figure

The most concrete number in this subject is what caregivers pay from their own pockets, because it comes from asking them.

AARP surveyed nearly 2,400 family caregivers in spring 2021 and found average annual out-of-pocket caregiving costs of $7,242, equivalent to 26% of the caregiver's income on average. Almost eight in ten reported routine out-of-pocket expenses. About half had used their own money on household expenses for the person they care for, 30% had covered rent or mortgage payments, and 21% had paid for home modifications.

Two things to hold onto. This is a 2021 study, fielded during the pandemic, and the dollar figure has not been inflation-adjusted here — it is reported as published. And it is spending only. It excludes the wages the caregiver did not earn, which is a much larger number and comes from a completely different kind of study.

AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving's Caregiving in the US 2025 report — the current national count, at 63 million caregivers, roughly one in four US adults — found nearly half of caregivers reporting at least one negative financial impact, including taking on debt, not saving, or using up short-term savings.

Hours given, and the two ways they get counted

Time is the largest cost of caregiving and the hardest to state honestly, because two federal-quality sources measure it differently and neither is wrong.

AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, in Caregiving in the US 2025, put the number of US family caregivers at 63 million — about one in four adults, a roughly 45-50% increase since 2015 — providing an average of 27 hours of care a week, with 24% providing 40 hours or more. That is a self-reported estimate of ongoing caregiving responsibility.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the same thing through the American Time Use Survey, which asks people to account for a single specific day. On that method, an average of 38.2 million people — 14% of the civilian non-institutional population aged 15 and over — provided unpaid eldercare in 2023-24. Only 28% of them provided care on any given day, and on the days they did, they spent an average of 3.9 hours.

Those look contradictory and are not. A diary study catches the day; a responsibility survey catches the role, which persists on days when no hands-on care happens. If you need the burden on the caregiver, use the responsibility figure. If you need national hours of care delivered, use the time-diary figure. Mixing them — quoting 63 million people at 3.9 hours a day, for instance — produces a number that describes nothing.

What those hours are worth — a valuation, not a payment

The headline "unpaid care is worth $X billion" figures are imputations. Nobody is paid that money. The method is to take the hours people report, multiply by what it would cost to buy that care in the market, and total it — a replacement-cost calculation. It is a legitimate and useful way to show the scale of what families absorb, and it is not a transfer of cash to anyone.

AARP's Public Policy Institute, in the 2023 update of Valuing the Invaluable, put the US value at about $600 billion for 2021. The arithmetic is stated openly: about 38 million caregivers, averaging 18 hours a week, giving 36 billion hours, valued at $16.59 an hour. Change any one of those inputs and the headline moves by tens of billions, which is why the inputs matter more than the total.

In the UK, Carers UK and the Centre for Care valued unpaid care in England and Wales at £162 billion a year, using hours reported in the 2021 Census priced at £25 an hour — the official unit cost of home care for an adult at the time. A companion report for the whole UK put the 2021/22 value at £184.3 billion.

In Australia, Deloitte Access Economics estimated for Carers Australia that 2.8 million carers would provide 2.2 billion hours of unpaid care in 2020, with a replacement value of A$77.9 billion a year — just under A$1.5 billion a week. Primary carers averaged more than 35 hours a week.

These three national totals are not comparable to each other. They use different hour sources, different wage rates and different years, and two of them cover different geographies than their headlines suggest.

Lost earnings and the pension gap — the cost that outlives the caring

The cost that does the most lasting damage is the income the caregiver never earns, and the retirement savings that never accumulate on top of it. It is invisible in any spending survey, because nothing was spent.

The best-documented estimate we could find is Australian. Evaluate, an independent economics practice, built a microsimulation model for Carers Australia in March 2022, running the observed distributions of gender, age at first call to care, duration of caring, employment status before and after, prior income and starting superannuation balance. At the mean, and at the subsidy settings then in force, an Australian carer loses $392,500 in lifetime earnings to age 67 and $175,000 in superannuation at 67. The most affected 10% lose at least $940,000 in lifetime income and $444,500 in retirement savings.

We report the Australian figure because its method is published and its assumptions are inspectable, not because Australia is unusual. The mechanism — reduced hours, career interruption, missed contributions compounding for decades — is not country-specific.

The US equivalent that circulates most widely, an average lifetime loss of $304,000 in wages and benefits, comes from a 2011 MetLife Mature Market Institute study. The Institute closed in 2013. That figure is fifteen years old and is still routinely presented as current; we do not use it as a current number.

Figures we left out, and why

Three categories of number were omitted from this page rather than caveated onto it.

The $304,000 average lifetime earnings loss. Real study, real institute, but published in 2011 by a body that was discontinued in 2013. Fifteen-year-old money presented as today's money is a mis-citation whoever repeats it, so it appears above only as a warning, not as a figure.

Per-condition weekly caregiving-hours tables. Precise hour counts by diagnosis circulate widely with authoritative-sounding attributions; we could not trace them to a publication and did not reproduce them.

Percentage reductions in burnout attributed to specific interventions. Respite care and support groups are genuinely well-supported in the caregiving literature. The specific percentages attached to them in circulating summaries are not traceable to the organisations they are credited to, so we describe the interventions and skip the decimals.

Where a figure appears above, the year and the method are stated. Where they could not be stated, the figure is not here.

Where a free daily check-in fits — and where it doesn't

Nothing on this page is solved by an app. Out-of-pocket spending, foregone wages and pension gaps are policy problems, and the fix for them is money and services, not software.

There is one narrow thing worth saying honestly on a page about cost. A large share of the daily strain caregivers describe is not a task at all — it is the background question of whether the person they care for is okay right now, running all day, on days when nothing is wrong. A daily check-in answers that specific question and nothing else: they confirm they're okay, you see it, and if they don't, you're told.

That replaces neither care nor money nor rest. It removes one recurring uncertainty from a load made of many. The daily check-in itself is free, which on a page about costs is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

If you are a caregiver looking for real support: in the US, the Eldercare Locator (1-800-677-1116) connects you to your local Area Agency on Aging, and the Caregiver Action Network (1-855-227-3640) offers free help. In the UK, the Carers UK Helpline is 0808 808 7777. In Australia, Carer Gateway is 1800 422 737.

I'm Alive is a daily check-in app. You confirm you're okay once a day; if you don't, the people you chose are told, with your location. The daily check-in is free (Try It, $0) and works on iPhone and Android anywhere in the world. Automatic alerts to your contacts start on Protect Me ($29.99/year), with location on the move on Protect Me On The Move ($39.99/year); there is a one-time Stay Connected lifetime upgrade at $4.99. Check-first phone fall detection is live on iPhone only (app v2.3.1) on Protect Me and above, stays off until you switch it on, and only runs while the app is open. It alerts your own trusted contacts — it never calls emergency services, and it is best-effort, not a medical device. The app interface is currently in English only.