2025 Executive Summary
Caregiving in the US 2025 presents a comprehensive picture of the growing and evolving landscape of family caregiving. In 2025, 63 million American adults provided ongoing care to adults or children with a medical condition or disabilityârepresenting almost one-quarter of all adults in the United States. This is a dramatic increase of 45 percent since Caregiving in the US was fielded in 2015. Of these 63 million caregivers, 59 million care for an adult with a complex medical condition or disability.
Family caregivers include parents, friends, neighbors, and even children, and they span across all ages, races and ethnicities, incomes, and communities. They assist care recipients with basic mobility, personal care, financial management, complex medical tasks, and more.
This report describes the critical role family caregivers play in supporting the nation’s fractured long-term services and supports system and highlights how policies and practices support this essential work and where gaps persist.
What’s New for 2025
The 2025 study builds on the last survey in 2020 with the following improvements:
- Addition of state representative caregiver samples for many states (to be summarized in a separate report to be published in November 2025)
- Inclusion of family caregivers participating in caregiver payment programs, such as through Medicaid home and community-based services self-direction waivers, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and state programs
- Use of a four-question summary measure of caregivers’ physical and emotional health, the CDC Healthy Days measure
- Inclusion of an expanded Level of Care Index that includes objective and subjective measures of the caregiving experience