Caring for our loved ones and neighbors is critical, important work that our families and communities depend on – and our analysis of new data from the 2024 American Time Use Survey underscores just how essential caregiving is. We find that Americans each spend 248 hours on average annually caring for and helping family, friends and loved ones. This labor of love includes providing child care to a grandkid or neighbor, taking care of a spouse at home after surgery or helping a great-aunt sort her pills and navigate a pile of insurance paperwork. Without this caregiving, parents couldn’t get to work and businesses would be shorthanded. Kids wouldn’t get their homework done or make it to medical check-ups. Nurses and hospitals would be even more overwhelmed with patients having to recover in-hospital. Our loved ones’ health would suffer.
And the impact of unpaid caregiving goes beyond just the value to our families and loved ones. In plain, hard dollars, if unpaid care work were compensated at the rate of our professional care workforce, it would be valued at more than $1.1 trillion a year. (And let’s be honest – that care workforce – virtually all women and disproportionately women of color – is itself seriously underpaid.)
Women Do Almost Two-Thirds of Unpaid Caregiving
Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of this unpaid care work is done by women, who spend an average of nearly 300 hours each a year on caregiving, equating to more than $683 billion in unpaid care work – $4,900 in unpaid care work each year for each woman in the U.S.
Across all racial/ethnic groups, women spend more time on unpaid caregiving than men. On an average day, Asian women spend the most time caregiving – nearly one hour (56 minutes) – followed by Latinas (52 minutes), white women (50 minutes) and Black women (41 minutes).
The value of each individual’s time spent caregiving is worth thousands of dollars – and the total value of care done by men and women in each racial/ethnic group is in the tens or hundreds of billions. For example, the total value of Asian women’s caregiving is about $52.7 billion; Black women’s, $78.7 billion and Latinas’, $127.8 billion.
Bros Have Loved Ones, Too – and Want to Take Care of Them
The data show a sizeable gender gap in time spent caregiving, with women doing about 1.6 times as much as men. There’s also a noticeable gender gap between the shares of women and men who report doing caregiving per day. A quarter (24.6 percent) of all women report caring for household members, compared to 18.6 percent of men, while 10.5 percent of women and 6.4 percent of men provide care for non-household members.
But contrary to what some media might suggest, this isn’t a gender war between bros and women, and it’s not because most men believe caregiving should all be done by tradwives. In reality, when a recent poll asked men what it means to be masculine, three-quarters (and more than eight out of 10 dads) said taking care of one’s kids makes a man more masculine. Men were much more likely to rank providing for their family (65 percent “extremely important”) and supporting their family emotionally and financially (58 percent) as a top priority than advancing their career (33 percent) or being respected by others (36 percent).
But in an economy that forces so many workers to choose between putting food on the table and providing the care their loved ones need, everyone gets the short end of the stick. The financial and job consequences tend to be more stark for women, who end up doing more caregiving, while men may work more hours but struggle to be the involved caregivers they’d like to be. This shows up as a big gap in the average time spent caregiving, and it’s persistent across race and ethnicity.
Workplace Flexibility Supports Caregivers – But It’s Not a Substitute for Care Policies
In the absence of strong nationwide policies to ensure that all working caregivers can take time away when they need it, hybrid and remote work policies help some workers to bridge the gaps, with mothers of young children and disabled people particularly benefitting. Even a few days a week of telecommuting goes a long way to help fit in a doctor’s appointment, pick up grandpa’s prescriptions, work with a disability or make bus pickup. But many jobs can’t be done remotely – you can’t cut hair or roof a house over Zoom – and other jobs that could be more flexible have bosses stuck in old-fashioned beliefs about work.
Today’s data show clear divides in access to remote work flexibility, with larger shares of highly educated workers and high-paid workers more likely to be working from home on an average day than workers with fewer degrees and those with lower-paying jobs. (These estimates are on the high side because they include not only fully remote or hybrid workers but all people who spent any amount of time working at home, even if only a few minutes.)
Still, while there do remain a lot of jobs that could allow more flexibility, telecommuting will never be a substitute for the full set of caregiver supports we need. And remote work alone will never be a replacement for real care supports. Nobody should be triaging emails and video calls in the middle of labor, and no amount of work flexibility can match a well-trained home health aide for an older relative who needs ongoing care.
America’s Caregivers Need More Support Like Paid Leave, Child Care, and Medicaid’s Home and Community Based Services – Not Tax Cuts for Billionaires
Americans’ more than $1.1 trillion in unpaid care labor is the glue that holds our families together – and it’s a huge contribution that caregivers make to the United States economy. Even though this work is vitally important, it often comes at a steep personal cost because the United States doesn’t do enough to support caregivers. For example, mothers lose nearly $300,000 on average in earnings and retirement benefits due to the impacts of caregiving on employment. They are also reporting sharp declines in mental health. Caring for loved ones shouldn’t come at such a high cost to mothers’ finances, careers and health.
People agree that families – and the country overall – would be better off if we provided caregivers the supports they need. Medicaid’s Home and Community Based Services help seniors and disabled adults be independent, paid leave allows us to care for our families, and affordable child care provides parents much-needed financial relief. In fact, more than nine out of 10 men support ensuring affordable child care and that workers have paid leave, right on par with the approximately nine out of 10 women who support the same policies.
But instead of recognizing that value of care work and helping to make people’s lives easier, Trump and the Congressional Republicans are working to devastate the nation’s existing caregiving supports by kicking millions off Medicaid, cutting wages for paid care workers and gutting agencies that protect caregivers’ rights at work like the Family and Medical Leave Act – all to give new tax breaks to billionaires and wealthy corporations.
Our families, communities and economy depend on the care we provide for one another and that makes all work possible. It’s time for policymakers to get serious about helping regular people and their families and invest in us – not give more handouts to the wealthiest people and corporations.
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. In the work-from-home data, earnings are for single job holders only who are full-time wage and salary workers. Each earnings category represents approximately one-quarter of these workers. Analysis is the value of care is based on the midpoint ($16.38/hr) between mean wages for child care workers ($15.93/hr) and home health or personal care aides ($16.82/hr), multiplied by the civilian population ages 15 and older.
The authors are grateful to Mettabel Law, Sharita Gruberg, Maddie Shirley and Gail Zuagar for their important contributions to this piece.
