Family caregivers in the United States provided an estimated 49.5 billion hours of care for adults in 2024, work that AARP's Public Policy Institute valued at $1.01 trillion. The figure makes the scale of caregiving visible, but it is an economic model, not a payroll total or a clinical measure of harm.
The March 2026 report drew on Caregiving in the US 2025, a national survey conducted in 2024. It estimated that 59 million adults provided care to an adult family member, friend or neighbor at some point during the year. About 37 million, or 63%, were providing care in a given month.
The Estimate Starts With Hours and Replacement Value
AARP estimated annual hours by using weekly care reported by people who were current caregivers, defined as providing care in the previous month, and multiplying by 52 weeks. People who had provided care during the year but not in the previous month were counted in the annual caregiver population but not in the national hours calculation.
The resulting 49.5 billion hours were valued at an average of $20.41 per hour. The model did not simply assign every hour the same minimum wage. It separated caregivers by the tasks they performed, including instrumental activities such as transportation and meal preparation, personal activities such as bathing and dressing, and medical or nursing tasks such as injections or catheter management.
For each state and task category, the hourly benchmark combined 75% wage data with 25% of the private-pay cost of home care. Multiplying the estimated hours by those replacement values produced the $1.01 trillion national figure.
One Trillion Dollars Is Not a Paycheck
The estimate describes what care is worth under the report's replacement-cost method. It does not mean caregivers earned $1.01 trillion, that the government owes a bill of exactly that size or that formal services could replace every family-care hour one for one.
A footnote states that the total covers all care represented in the survey whether or not an individual hour was paid, although AARP says nearly all family caregiving is unpaid. The safest description is therefore an estimated economic value of family care, rather than a measured total of unpaid wages.
The distinction matters because family care includes relationships and tasks that do not map neatly onto a commercial service. Replacement pricing is useful for showing scale, but it cannot reveal what every caregiver would choose, what a paid system would cost after administration or how care quality would change.
The Medicaid Comparison Shows Scale, Not a Transfer
AARP compared the $1.01 trillion estimate with $931.7 billion in federal, state and local Medicaid spending in 2024. It also exceeded private-business health spending and was almost twice total long-term services, post-acute care and out-of-pocket health spending in the years used for those comparisons.
Those contrasts make the number legible, but they compare a modeled value of time with actual spending accounts. They do not show that family caregivers directly saved Medicaid $1.01 trillion or that every hour would otherwise have been purchased by a public program.
Family caregiving can delay or replace some paid support, and the report describes substantial public benefit. Quantifying that effect would require a different analysis of what services would have occurred without the caregiver, who would have paid and how much of the care could be substituted.
The Increase Since 2021 Needs Context
AARP's previous report valued family care at $600 billion in 2021. The new estimate is two-thirds higher, but the organization warns that source data and methods changed, so totals across years are not directly comparable.
The 2026 analysis counts 59 million people who provided care during the year, while earlier reports presented the number providing care in a month. On the comparable monthly definition, the new estimate is about 37 million, not meaningfully different from the 38 million reported for 2021.
The report attributes the larger value mainly to more hours and a higher assigned value per hour, not to a surge in the number of monthly caregivers. Average weekly care rose from 23.7 hours in the 2020 survey to 27 hours in the 2025 report. The hourly value increased from $16.59 to $20.41; AARP estimates that 90% of that hourly increase reflected higher home-care costs and wages and 10% the new method.
Care Intensity Is Central to the Policy Question
The report says 57% of adult caregivers perform high-intensity care and 55% carry out medical or nursing tasks usually handled by health professionals. Its caregiver accounts describe work, sleep, medical appointments and personal time being organized around another person's needs.
Those accounts support concern about health, well-being and long-term economic security, but the $1.01 trillion calculation does not itself measure lost earnings, retirement losses or disease caused by caregiving. Those outcomes require their own evidence and should not be inserted into the valuation as though they were part of the same total.
AARP uses the estimate to advocate for measures including caregiver tax credits and workplace support. Medical Xpress noted that Oklahoma enacted a statewide caregiver tax credit in 2023 and that other states were considering related legislation. The report supplies scale for that debate; it does not calculate the effect of any single policy.
The Number Should Clarify the Debate
The $1.01 trillion estimate exposes a real accounting blind spot. Care provided inside a home can be economically essential even when no invoice records it. Treating that work as valueless because it is performed by relatives is indefensible.
But a large replacement-value estimate cannot carry every political claim attached to it. It does not prove forced labor, coercion or a dollar-for-dollar subsidy to Medicare and Medicaid. The evidence is strong enough without that inflation: 49.5 billion hours, an average of 27 hours a week among caregivers, and task-specific work that often reaches medical intensity. The honest conclusion is harder than the slogan. The United States relies on a vast care workforce it largely does not pay, while its headline value remains a model whose assumptions must stay visible.