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Taking care of our families and loved ones – watching a niece after school, helping a grandfather with his prescriptions, or taking a child to the dentist – is essential work. This labor of love, which is all too often unseen and undervalued, not only sustains our communities, it also supports our economy.

Just how important is caregiving for our economy? Our analysis of new data from the 2025 American Time Use Survey finds that Americans spend an average of 234 hours a year caring for and helping family, friends and loved ones. If Americans’ unpaid care work was compensated at the rate of our professional care workforce, it would be worth more than $1.1 trillion a year – equivalent to 3.6 percent of our GDP or, outrageously, Elon Musk’s net worth.

Despite the enormous impact of this work, caregiving is undersupported and undervalued, primarily because the large majority of care work – both paid and unpaid – is done by women. Paid caregivers, virtually all women and disproportionately women of color, are paid very low wages. These wages are rooted in our nation’s history of paying women, especially women of color, little to nothing for their care work and excluding them from workplace protections. This devaluation of care extends to unpaid care, which is treated as inconsequential and ignored in standard economic models.

When we support caregivers, more families can afford what they need to thrive. But right now, our system is set up to benefit a wealthy few, rather than workers and caregivers, including millions of women. If the U.S. recognized the importance of caregiving – by investing in paid leave, affordable child care, supporting disabled loved ones, and raising wages for professional care workers – the powerful couldn’t get away with undervaluing women’s work. All of these changes would help women balance work and care responsibilities – and take home a bigger paycheck. These changes would especially benefit women of color, who face the largest pay gaps and also deal with racism on top of everything else. Supporting workers and caregivers helps grow the economy and make life more affordable for everyone.

Women Do More Than 60 Percent of Unpaid Caregiving

Women do 62 percent of the nation’s unpaid care work, spending an average of more than 280 hours a year on caregiving. This equates to more than $682 billion in unpaid care work – $4,800 in unpaid care work annually for each woman in the U.S.

Across all racial and ethnic groups, women spend more time on unpaid caregiving than men. On an average day, Latinas spend the most time caregiving – more than one hour, followed by white women (49 minutes) and Black women (32 minutes). People spend most of their caregiving time taking care of people who live with them, primarily children. Men spend about half of their unpaid care time taking care of children who live with them. Women spend 62 percent of their unpaid care time on household children.

The value of each individual’s time spent caregiving is worth thousands of dollars annually – and the total value of care done by men and women in each racial and ethnic group is in the tens or hundreds of billions. For example, the total value of Latinas’ caregiving is $169 billion and Black women’s is $66 billion.

Caregivers are Struggling to Keep Up

These days, being a caregiver is increasingly challenging. Powerful decisionmakers – from the White House to Wall Street – are cutting care supports that are harming caregivers and their loved ones, especially women. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has cut funding for a range of essential programs, including for home- and community-based services, thus making it harder for disabled people or older loved ones to get the care supports they need to stay in their homes or remain connected to their jobs and communities. And in D.C., Mayor Bowser is pushing for drastic cuts to the city’s paid family and medical leave program, despite clear evidence that doing so would harm both workers and the D.C. economy.

Powerful CEOs are also playing a role. Companies are slashing essential benefits like paid leave while passing the growing costs of health care premiums onto their workers. At the same time, they are increasingly demanding workers return to office (RTO), despite evidence that it does not improve productivity while harming employee morale. These RTO mandates are taking away critical flexibility that workers – especially working mothers and disabled workers – rely on to help them stay in the labor force while navigating care responsibilities.

Due in part to these policy choices, the price of caregiving is increasing, even as wages struggle to keep pace. Child care prices continue to rise, even as jobs in the field decline, driving down the availability of care and in turn the labor force participation rates for mothers of young children. The price for home health care is up 7.9 percent since last year – nearly double the change in the Consumer Price Index overall during the same period. All of these changes make it more challenging for families to afford professional care support – and make the role of unpaid caregivers even more critical.

We Need An Economy that Supports Caregivers – Not the Ultra Wealthy and Powerful

This perfect storm is squeezing caregivers and their families – but it doesn’t have to be this way. Decisionmakers could instead invest in policies that create an economy that supports families, not just the powerful few.

For example, enacting a national paid family and medical leave program would make caregiving more affordable for millions of workers. While 15 states have enacted paid family and medical leave policies, two-thirds of workers don’t have access to paid leave through state programs. Yet, National Partnership research shows that under the FAMILY Act, the typical worker would receive more than $9,700 for 12 weeks of leave – enough to cover basic expenses like rent, groceries, health care and more.

Additionally, telework decisions should not be left solely in the hands of employers, which leaves workers at the mercy of winning the boss lottery. Instead, decisionmakers should enact policies to increase telework access when possible while also ensuring workers without access to telework receive the support they need.

Supporting caregivers helps our economy grow and makes life more affordable for families. Instead of having a system set up to benefit the wealthy few, we should value and support caregiving – by investing in paid leave, affordable child care, supports for disabled loved ones, raising wages for professional care workers and more. Then the powerful couldn’t get away with exploiting caregivers’ unpaid work. Investing in workers and caregivers can make life more affordable for everyone.

Methods note: Analysis is based on primary activities of the civilian population ages 15 and older analyzing time spent caring for and helping household and non-household members. People younger than 15 may be providing care. People in this analysis may also be providing care as a secondary activity while performing another primary activity such as cooking or watching TV. See the American Time Use Survey Technical Note for additional information. Latinas may be of any race and all racial groups include people who are Hispanic but do not include multiracial people to match the published Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis. Analysis is the value of care is based on the midpoint ($17.10/hr) between mean wages for child care workers ($16.84/hr) and home health or personal care aides ($17.36/hr), multiplied by the civilian population ages 15 and older.

The authors are grateful to Sharita Gruberg, Areeba Haider, Mettabel Law, Jesse Matton, Taryn Williams and Gail Zuagar for their important contributions to this piece.