Roughly 15% of American adults are balancing work and family caregiving, yet at most companies that work stays invisible.
Jason Resendez
President and CEO, National Alliance for Caregiving
When your mother gets diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer, how do you respond? If you are like Selena of New York, you drive to your mom’s house every day before and after work; you manage appointments, medicine, and more when you can find a free moment or have a break at lunch; and you do it all while trying to manage a full caseload of your own work, without taking leave or discussing it with your colleagues. You simply keep showing up everywhere you are needed.
Similar stories can be found in offices, cubicles, warehouses, and kitchen tables across the country every single day. Employees do not leave caregiving at the door when they log on or commute into the office. They carry it into every call, meeting, deadline, and performance review.
Caregiving is invisible by design
At most companies, caregiving is invisible by design. Employers track headcount, utilization, and productivity in granular detail, but almost none can answer a basic question about their own workforce: How many of our people are caring for a family member right now? Caregiving is one of the parts of employees’ lives that companies have struggled to see, let alone design for.
It is difficult to understand the breadth of the issue when looking at any single company. While you may only know of one caregiver at your office, there are likely many more who have not raised their hand to identify themselves. According to Caregiving in the US 2025, the latest national data from the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, 63 million Americans are family caregivers, and 6 in 10 are employed. This means that roughly 15% of American adults are balancing work and family caregiving.
Roughly half of these working caregivers face regular disruptions, such as arriving late or leaving early, to handle care needs. Nearly 6 in 10 caregivers say caregiving has affected their career trajectories, including turning down a promotion, cutting their hours, or leaving the workforce entirely. Caregiving also takes a toll that follows people back to their desks: 1 in 5 caregivers report fair or poor health, and nearly 1 in 4 say they struggle to care for their own health while caring for someone else.
Start by counting caregivers
For HR leaders, the lesson is simple: You cannot support what you cannot see. Building a culture of care starts with recognizing family caregivers in the workforce, and that begins with data. Voluntary self-identification campaigns, benefits enrollment surveys, and employee resource groups can give employers an honest picture of how many caregivers they employ and what those caregivers actually need. That data should then drive benefit design, so that offerings reflect the real lives of the workforce rather than assumptions about it.
The national data offers a starting point. Caregiving in the US 2025 shows that caregivers support paid leave (55%), tax credits (69%), and programs that provide direct compensation (68%) or respite (40%). While these are policy responses, they tell employers something directly: Caregivers are asking to be addressed and to have their needs planned for. However, the most valuable insights will come from employers asking their own people.
Make benefits visible and safe
Recognition is only half of the equation. The other half is visibility. Many companies already offer caregiving-related benefits that go chronically underused, because employees either do not know they exist or fear that using them will mark them as less committed. Employers can change that through sustained awareness and education campaigns, and the most powerful version of those campaigns puts senior leaders front and center. When a vice president shares openly that she used backup care during her father’s hospitalization, or a division head talks about taking caregiver leave, it does two things at once: It teaches employees what is available, and it signals that using these benefits is not a career risk.
That is the insight behind Care @ Work, a storytelling initiative the National Alliance for Caregiving launched featuring executives and business leaders who are also family caregivers. By sharing their personal experiences, participants are helping normalize conversations about caregiving in the workplace and demonstrating that supporting caregivers is not simply an employee benefit; it is a business imperative. Employers can bring this same model in-house, uplifting the caregiving stories of their own managers and executives so that caregivers at every level feel seen, supported, and able to succeed without having to choose between their careers and the people who depend on them.
Culture does what policy cannot
Company culture must step in to do the work that federal policy and benefits packages alone cannot. Employees need greater feelings of security in their balance of work and caregiving. Employers can offer this by training managers to recognize signs of strain or burden, without requiring employees to disclose a family situation or diagnosis. Flexibility must be the standard design, not something employees must ask permission for.
Employers also have real levers to pull, in-house and in Washington. Paid family leave and flexible, predictable scheduling should not be perks only available to some. Large companies that have sway should support policies that make it easier to balance caregiving and work, since every dollar of care that falls back on families falls back on their employees, too.
In these efforts and in their benefit design, we are asking employers to be realistic. They must stop designing packages for the person who has never had to miss work to take care of a sick child or parent, for the person who has never had a loved one facing disability or medical emergency. Those employees are exceedingly rare, while millions of others like Selena are already heading into work this morning.
