Living Situations

The living situations of family caregivers and those they care for affects caregiving in important ways. Understanding details like whether the caregiver and the care recipient live in the same place or at a distance and whether the care recipient lives alone or with others is critical for understanding caregivers’ well-being and their needs for specific services and supports.

Forty percent of caregivers live with their care recipient (up from 34 percent in 2015), and 35 percent live within 20 minutes of their care recipient. More than 10 percent live an hour or more away from their care recipient. Lower-income caregivers, making $50,000 in annual household income or less, more often live with their care recipients (49 percent) than do higher-income caregivers (36 percent). Caregivers who are men (44 percent compared with 38 percent for women), Hispanic/Latino (45 percent), LGBTQ+ (48 percent), and African American/Black (43 percent) family members and friends also more often live with their care recipients. These findings may be a factor of the intensity of the care recipient’s needs, but they also could reflect cultural comfort among African American/Black and Hispanic/Latino families with multigenerational living (Guzman and Skow 2019).

Just over one-fifth of caregivers (22 percent) who live with their care recipients are providing 21 or more hours of care weekly. In comparison, about one-tenth (12 percent) of caregivers who live apart from their care recipients provide the same care hours. In addition to providing more hours of care, caregivers who live with the family member or friend they care for get help less often, whether from unpaid helpers (36 percent compared with 65 percent living apart) or paid helpers (22 percent compared with 39 percent for those living apart).

Three-quarters of care recipients who do not live with their caregiver live in their own home. Of those, 1 in 10 live in formal long-term care settings like nursing homes or assisted living facilities, similar to findings in 2020; 3 in 10 care recipients who live in a home or community setting live alone.

Sandwich generation caregivers care for a child and an older adult at the same time and are sandwiched between these care responsibilities. Almost one-third (29 percent) of all family caregivers have children or grandchildren under 18 living at home while caring for an adult family member or friend. Those under age 50 are more often sandwich generation caregivers than older caregivers (47 percent compared with 14 percent). More African American/Black (36 percent) and Hispanic/Latino family caregivers (43 percent) care for a child who lives in their household and an adult care recipient than overall.

Some family caregivers include paid or unpaid helpers in their network of support. There are some key differences in which groups of caregivers are more likely to use help that may reflect need, access to help, or family composition.

Paid help. One-third of family caregivers have paid help (32 percent; figure 11). The use of paid help is more common among those with higher incomes (35 percent compared with 24 percent of lower-income caregivers), those with more than $50,000 in annual household income, and working family caregivers (35 percent compared with 27 percent of those not working). Those caring for someone with a long-term physical condition use paid help more often (75 percent compared with 57 percent with no paid help). Caregivers of someone with the following conditions also more often use paid help: memory problem (46 percent compared with 29 percent with no paid help), developmental or intellectual disorder or delay (16 percent compared with 10 percent with no paid help), and behavioral issue (12 percent compared with 9 percent with no paid help).

Unpaid help. About half of all caregivers (53 percent) include unpaid helpers in their network of support (see figure 11). Some caregivers more often use unpaid help. Men more often have unpaid help (56 percent) than women (51 percent) and report that some other unpaid helper provided most of the care (47 percent of men compared with 42 percent of women). Caregivers who do not live with their care recipient use paid help more often (65 percent) than those who live with their care recipient (36 percent).

Lower-income family caregivers and LGBTQ+ family caregivers use any help, whether paid or unpaid, less often than their counterparts. Only a quarter (24 percent) of LGBTQ+ caregivers have paid help, and only 43 percent have unpaid help. Among lower-income family caregivers, only 24 percent use paid help, and 42 percent have unpaid help.

Children as part of family caregiving. Children may also assist their families or households with caregiving. Among caregivers who have any unpaid help, 7 percent of all family caregivers include a child under 18 as one of their unpaid helpers. Based on a population of 31 million caregivers of adults who have unpaid help, we estimate 4 million children under 18 in those households provide care to an adult recipient.

Respite care, or care provided to a care recipient so that their family caregiver can get a break from care responsibilities, is widely cited as a helpful support to caregivers (Reinhard, Tilly, and Flinn 2024). Although nearly 4 in 10 caregivers report that respite services would be helpful (see figure 13), only 13 percent of all caregivers use respite services. Other work has identified practical barriers to respite use, like inflexible program design, lack of trained providers, and difficult application processes, and more subjective barriers, such as lack of trust, shame around handing off care to someone else, or uncertainty about the quality of available respite services (Leocadie, Roy, and Rothan-Tondeur 2018; Min, 2021).

Respite care use is more common among caregivers with paid help (25 percent compared with 8 percent), caregivers providing high hours of care (17 percent compared with 11 percent), and caregivers working full time (17 percent compared with 13%). This suggests that respite care is more often used by those whose care recipients have more needs.