Caregiving has long been a reality for millions of families — shaping daily life, financial decisions, and emotional well-being. Yet only recently have its implications for employers and the workforce come into clearer focus. Recent research from the Integrated Benefits Institute (IBI) helps employers understand who today’s working caregivers are and how caregiving shows up across industries, roles, and household structures.
Caregiving is interwoven with work and family life
Using nationally representative data from 1,074 working caregivers — representing an estimated 8.98 million caregivers nationwide — along with real-world data from thousands of caregivers receiving coordinated support through Wellthy, the study provides a detailed portrait of caregiving in the modern workforce. Rather than fitting into a single profile, working caregivers span generations, industries, and household structures in ways that carry meaningful implications for employers.
One of the clearest findings from the IBI report is that caregiving is not confined to a single demographic corner of the workforce. Instead, it shows up across age groups, genders, industries, and household structures.
Caregiving peaks during prime career years: 44.9% of working caregivers are between ages 51–65, and another 32.3% are between ages 36–50. These are the years when many employees are advancing into senior roles or leadership positions — a dynamic often overlooked in traditional benefit design.
Women continue to play a central caregiving role: 62.3% of working caregivers are women, while 37.7% are men. Within family structures, adult daughters are the single largest caregiving group (43.0%), followed by adult sons (21.1%).
Caregiving often intersects with raising children: 34.7% of working caregivers have children under 18 in their household. This contributes to what is commonly referred to as the “sandwich generation,” but IBI’s data shows this category is more varied than the classic narrative suggests.
Multigenerational caregiving takes many forms: 86.3% of those caring for grandparents also have children under 18 at home, along with 50.7% of those caring for extended family members, and 37.1% of those caring for parents or parents-in-law. These patterns show that responsibility often falls not only to middle-aged adults caring for parents, but also to younger workers supporting grandparents or extended family — often with competing household demands.
Caregivers span income and educational levels: caregiving is not concentrated in a single socioeconomic segment. 30.7% of working caregivers earn more than $80,000 annually, while 27.6% earn less than $20,000. Educational attainment is similarly diverse, with 23.7% holding bachelor’s degrees and 18.0% holding advanced degrees.
And they are employed across industries: the workforce footprint includes both knowledge-based and frontline roles. 38.2% of working caregivers are employed in Business/IT Services, 29.1% in Financial Services, and 19.6% in Manufacturing/Retail. For employers, these patterns matter because caregiving isn’t isolated to particular teams or job types — it shows up in environments with flexible schedules and remote options, as well as in roles where flexibility is limited or unavailable.
Why these patterns matter
Behind every data point in the IBI report is a story of someone navigating two worlds at once: the world of work and the world of care. Workers are getting aging parents to appointments before morning stand-ups. They’re coordinating medical paperwork on lunch breaks. They’re checking on grandparents, siblings, spouses, and children between meetings or after shifts.
For employers, understanding who caregivers are is a critical first step — because caregiving isn’t an edge case. It’s woven through the fabric of the modern workforce. And as more organizations acknowledge that caregiving doesn’t stay at home, they’re beginning to rethink benefits, workplace policies, and support models that make it possible for employees to care for the people they love without stepping out of the workforce to do it.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at how caregiving responsibilities translate into measurable impacts at work, from productivity strain to absence and workforce exit.
To learn more about IBI’s latest research, join a February 4, 2026 webinar, “Supporting caregivers to protect worker productivity,” where Wellthy will join with researchers at IBI to discuss the impact of care on the modern workforce. You can register for that webinar here.
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