The Invisible Workforce Crisis: Why Caregiving Benefits Are the Next Mental Health Moment

Download

Scan the code to download Arlow and get personalized support for you and your family, all in one place.

›

The Invisible Workforce Crisis: Why Caregiving Benefits Are the Next Mental Health Moment

Michelle Bianco

Chief Experience Officer, Co-Founder

Last updated:

June 15, 2026

Quick Takeaways

Between 23% and 43% of employed adults are managing caregiving responsibilities alongside paid work (Guardian Life, 2025).
Caregiving costs employers an average of $5,600 per caregiving employee each year in combined absenteeism and presenteeism (Value in Health, 2023).
Elder caregiving is following the same workplace trajectory mental health followed a decade ago: first hidden, then measurable, then strategic.
Standard benefits such as EAPs, FMLA, and PTO were built for predictable, time-bound life events. Elder care is neither predictable nor time-bound.
Caregiving skills show 100% overlap with the core management competencies employers value most (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2025).
Employers who build a named caregiving benefit now gain a measurable advantage in retention, productivity, and talent strategy.

‍

Over the past decade, mental health quietly moved from a personal matter to a strategic business priority. That transition happened because employers started connecting the dots between employee wellbeing and the business impact on retention, performance, healthcare costs, and culture. Caregiving benefits are now on the exact same trajectory, and most organizations have not yet adapted.

The cost is real, it is already inside your workforce, and benefits leaders are in the best position to lead the change. This article walks through the evidence: how large the caregiving population is, why it stays invisible, what it costs, why your current benefits do not reach it, and what forward-thinking employers are doing instead.

In short

Caregiving is the next mental health. Between 23% and 43% of your employees are already caregivers, the cost averages $5,600 per caregiving employee per year, and traditional benefits were not designed to address it. Employers who invest in dedicated elder caregiving support now will lead on retention and productivity, just as the early movers on mental health did.

‍How Is Caregiving Following the Same Pattern as Mental Health?

Caregiving today looks the way mental health looked before it became a board-level priority: underreported by employees, invisible in benefits data, and surfacing only as absenteeism, disengagement, and unexplained turnover. In 2024, 80% of working caregivers said their employer is more understanding of childcare than adult caregiving (AARP/S&P Global, 2024), the same kind of support gap that once surrounded mental health.

Before mental health support was widely adopted, it too was underreported. Employees rarely disclosed it directly. Instead, it surfaced as chronic absenteeism, quiet disengagement, and unexpected departures that never got explained in a typical exit interview.

Caregiving is in that same place right now. Employees are supporting aging parents, spouses with chronic conditions, or adult family members recovering from health events, yet they are not sharing those challenges at work. They are absorbing the load quietly and at significant personal cost, and that cost is spilling directly into your organization.

	Mental health, circa 2015	Elder caregiving, today
Disclosure	Rarely disclosed; stigma drove silence	Rarely disclosed; fear of career consequences drives silence
Where it surfaced	Absenteeism, disengagement, attrition	Unplanned absence, presenteeism, mid-career attrition
Employer response	Treated as a personal matter	Treated as a personal matter, often routed to a general EAP
Turning point	Employers connected wellbeing to cost and built dedicated support	Happening now: the data exists, the support layer mostly does not

‍
Verdict: Mental health became a strategic priority once employers saw the cost data and built structured support. The caregiving cost data already exists. The structured support is the missing piece.

How Many of Your Employees Are Caregivers?

More than you think. Between 23% and 43% of employed adults are currently managing caregiving responsibilities alongside their work (Guardian Life, 2025), and elder caregivers alone make up 14% of the U.S. workforce (Harvard Business Review, 2025). In a workforce of 1,000 employees, that is 230 to 430 people carrying what amounts to a second, invisible shift.

An elder caregiver is an employee who provides unpaid, ongoing care for an aging parent, spouse, or other adult family member, covering medical coordination, financial and legal decisions, and daily support. There are 47.8 million unpaid adult family caregivers in the U.S. (Caregiving in the U.S., 2025), and the average caregiver provides about 25 hours of care per week (CaregiverAction.org, 2025). One in four provides more than 40 hours per week, a full-time job layered on top of a full-time job.

Unlike parental leave or childcare, elder caregiving does not come with a defined start and end date. There is no developmental milestone chart. Instead, there are emergency department visits at unpredictable hours, multiple physician appointments, care transitions, and the constant weight of managing the current situation while fearing what may come next.

This is ongoing, not temporary, and it is happening inside your workforce right now.

Why Are Employers Underestimating the Impact of Caregiving?

Most organizations are not ignoring caregiving on purpose. They are underestimating it because it is structurally difficult to see: employees hide it, benefits data does not capture it, and when it does appear it gets miscategorized as a personal matter. Nearly 50% of caregiving workers report disruptions like arriving late, leaving early, or reducing hours (ZenCaregiving, 2025), yet almost none of that shows up labeled as caregiving.

It is hidden

Employees routinely conceal their caregiving out of fear: fear of being perceived as less committed, fear of being passed over for a well-deserved promotion, and fear of being seen as a liability in the eyes of a manager. The organization only sees the downstream symptoms: missed deadlines, inconsistent availability, and a drop in productivity from someone who was a high performer just a few months ago.

It is hard to measure

Caregiving does not appear as a line item in your benefits utilization report. It shows up instead in unplanned absences, presenteeism, and increased use of EAP services and healthcare claims. Presenteeism is the productivity lost when an employee is physically present but their cognitive and emotional bandwidth has been substantially redirected, and for caregivers it is often the largest and least visible share of the cost.

It is often miscategorized

When caregiving does surface, it tends to be treated as a personal situation rather than a workforce issue. Responding with empathy is kind, and it matters. But empathy without infrastructure leaves both the employee and the organization absorbing the same costs again next quarter. Providing structured caregiving support is what changes the trajectory.

How Much Does Caregiving Cost Employers?

An estimated $5,600 per caregiving employee per year in combined absenteeism and presenteeism (Value Health, 2023). On top of that, working caregivers miss an average of 1.2 workdays per month, which translates to roughly $17.5 billion in lost wages nationally each month (SHRM, 2025).

The deeper cost is retention. The AARP/S&P Global workforce research (2024) and SHRM's 2025 caregiving reports document how caregiving reshapes careers:

Career outcome	Share of working caregivers	What it costs the employer
Reduce hours or shift to part-time	27%	Lost capacity in experienced roles
Decline promotions	16%	Stalled leadership pipeline
Stop working temporarily	16%	Coverage gaps and re-onboarding costs
Change employers altogether	13%	Replacement at 50% to 200% of salary
Report measurable career challenges	42%	Disengagement across nearly half the caregiving population

Verdict: Every row is a direct, recurring cost. And it lands on your most experienced people: the median age of an elder caregiver is 50.6 years (National Alliance for Caregiving, 2025), exactly the demographic holding the deepest institutional knowledge and your bench for senior leadership.

The caregiver is paying too. Caregivers spend an average of $7,200 per year out of pocket on care-related costs, and 90% contribute financially to care (CaregiverAction.org, 2025). Financial strain of that size is a known driver of presenteeism, health claims, and voluntary attrition.

Why Don't Standard Benefits Cover Elder Caregiving?

Because they were designed for predictable, time-bound life events, and elder care is neither. 80% to 90% of working caregivers expect their caregiving responsibilities to continue long term (SHRM, 2025), which makes short-term tools structurally insufficient. This is a design gap, not a failure of HR. No one built today's benefits architecture with a multi-year, unpredictable elder care journey in mind.

Benefit	Where it falls short for elder caregiving
EAP	A handful of counseling sessions helps, but it does not address the logistical, clinical, and navigation complexity that drives the stress
FMLA / intermittent leave	Protects absence but does nothing for presenteeism or the daily work of navigating care
FSA / HSA	Rarely covers broader caregiving expenses like care coordination or transportation, which average $7,200 per year out of pocket
Wellness programs	Built for health behavior change, not the sustained stress of caregiving; they address symptoms, not the cause
PTO	A short-term tool applied to a multi-year reality

Verdict: Each benefit covers a slice of the problem. None covers the journey. That is why caregivers exhaust these tools and still leave.

<white>

“80% of working caregivers say their employer is more understanding of childcare than adult caregiving. That perception reflects a real gap in benefits design, a blind spot no one created on purpose.”

AARP/S&P Global, 2024

</white>

Are Caregiving Employees a Liability or an Asset?

An asset, and the research is unambiguous. When MIT Sloan Management Review mapped caregiving competencies against the core workplace skills employers demand (2025), caregiving skills covered 76.5% of all workforce skills valued by employers, and for management roles the overlap was 100%: adaptability, problem solving, decision making, and leadership itself.

That finding should reframe the entire conversation. A caregiving employee is not only managing their own wellbeing but another person's health entirely. They coordinate across providers, make high-stakes financial and legal decisions under uncertainty, and sustain performance under prolonged pressure. These are precisely the human, adaptive, and relational skills that machines cannot replicate.

Your caregiving employees are among the most capable people in your organization. The strategic question is how long they can sustain that capability without meaningful support.

What Happens If Employers Wait?

The cost does not wait with you. Organizations that delay a caregiving support structure still pay for caregiving; they simply absorb it without a framework, which is the most expensive way to pay.

In practice, this is what unsupported caregiving looks like: productivity losses compound quietly across the caregiving population. Mid-career and senior employees who feel unsupported at a critical life stage begin to leave. Managers absorb informal caregiving requests they are not equipped to handle. And eventually, your benefits strategy is visibly behind where your employees need it to be, at exactly the moment top talent is starting to evaluate employers on it.

The opportunity is to lead now with a proactive benefits strategy rather than react later to attrition data.

What Are Forward-Thinking Employers Doing About Caregiving?

They are making caregiving support deliberate, visible, and structural. The pattern across early movers follows five steps:

Name the population. Recognize caregivers as a defined employee group and build infrastructure around that recognition, rather than leaving support buried inside a general EAP.
Invest in proactive, continuous support. Crisis-driven resources reach employees only after they are already overwhelmed. Proactive support reaches them while the situation is still manageable.
Extend support beyond the employee. Cover the person being cared for and the whole family unit, because the employee caregiver needs help with the entire situation, not just their own stress.
Equip managers. Train frontline leaders to recognize caregiver strain and respond with support instead of improvisation.
Integrate caregiving into the wellbeing strategy. Position it alongside mental health, physical health, and financial wellness as a core pillar, not another point solution.

This is where Arlow fits. Arlow is a clinician-led platform designed specifically for the elder caregiving journey, combining care coordination tools, clinical guidance, and support for the caregiver's own wellbeing, embedded in your existing benefits architecture. Employers

The Bottom Line

Caregiving is the next major workforce challenge, and the evidence is already in hand: 23% to 43% of employed adults are caregiving today, the average cost runs $5,600 per caregiving employee per year, and the benefits most employers offer were never designed for this journey.

The mental health parallel is instructive because it is a proven path. Employers who invested early in mental health infrastructure saw returns in retention, performance, and culture. The same window is open for caregiving right now.

The question is not whether your organization will eventually address this. The question is whether you will address it before the cost becomes impossible to ignore.

<lilac>

Learn how Arlow can help your organization build a caregiving-ready workforce. Visit www.arlow.ai to schedule a consultation.

</lilac>

Frequently asked questions

How is elder caregiving different from childcare?

Childcare follows a developmental arc with a defined start and predictable milestones, and society has built infrastructure around it, from daycares to schools. Elder care is nonlinear and open-ended: it averages 4 to 5 years but can run 15 or more, it is punctuated by sudden declines, and it involves high-stakes medical, legal, and financial decisions across a fragmented care system. Benefits built on the childcare model do not transfer.

Does an EAP count as a caregiving benefit?

Not on its own. An EAP offers a small number of counseling sessions, which helps with emotional strain but does not touch the logistical, clinical, and navigation burden that drives most caregiving stress: coordinating specialists, managing medications, handling insurance denials, and vetting care facilities. A caregiving benefit needs to address the journey, not just the feelings about the journey.

Why don't employees tell their employer they are caregivers?

Fear of career consequences. Caregivers worry about being seen as less committed, being passed over for promotions, or being labeled a liability by their manager. That silence means low disclosure is not evidence of low need. If you have not heard about caregiving in your workforce, that is a measurement gap, not an absence of the problem.

What should an elder caregiving benefit include?

A named, visible benefit, not support buried inside an EAP. Look for clinician-guided navigation of the care journey, care coordination tools that reduce the cognitive load spilling into the workday, support for legal and financial decisions, manager education, and resources that extend to the person being cared for. Caregiving ERGs add a community layer.

Can self-insured employers add caregiving support outside open enrollment?

In most cases, yes. Self-insured employers typically have the flexibility to add a caregiving point solution mid-year rather than waiting for the next enrollment cycle, which means the cost of waiting is a choice, not a constraint. Your benefits counsel can confirm specifics for your plan.

How can HR measure caregiving impact without disclosure data?

Use proxy signals: unplanned absence patterns, intermittent FMLA usage, EAP utilization themes, shifts in healthcare claims among employees aged 45 to 64, and exit interview patterns among mid-career staff. A short anonymous workforce assessment is the fastest way to size the population directly; many employers are surprised to find 23% to 43% of employees are actively caregiving (Guardian Life, 2025).

Author

Michelle Bianco

Chief Experience Officer, Co-Founder

Healthcare executive and licensed physical therapist with experience in digital health platforms, leading value-based care initiatives, and implementing patient-centered innovation at scale.