Elder care is billing employers through their most expensive employees

The mechanism is hours. A household that needs 40 hours a week of non-medical help can buy them at the 2025 median rate, which works out to $35 an hour times 40 hours times 52 weeks, or $72,800 a year ^[20]; the families in the reporting described the same shape of number at $30 an hour, over $60,000 ^[18]. Or the household supplies the hours itself, in which case the bill is settled in shifts somebody else was counting on. Linda Barton described the substitution directly: "If we don't pay for caregivers, we end up sacrificing work when they need something" ^[12].

The Dentmon household shows how large the unpaid line gets. Six adult children combine roughly 180 hours of care a week ^[1], which is 30 hours each ^[14], and the family still pays what the reporting puts at $4,000 a week ^[2] for round-the-clock help, upward of $192,000 a year ^[13]. Valued at the same market rate the family would otherwise pay, those 180 hours are worth about $6,300 a week, close to 1.6 times the cash bill ^[15]. The bigger half of that care budget is drawn off working-age calendars, and nobody sends an employer an invoice for it.

Two failure modes sit at opposite ends of the same careers. At one end, Business Insider spoke with people who quit high-paying jobs to take on full-time caregiving [c2b]. At the other, Kim Berling, 66, and her husband, 72, both keep working to support his 99-year-old mother, and neither has anything saved for their own long-term care ^[8][10]. "We work because we have to, not because we want to," Berling said ^[8]. One shows up in an employer's records as a resignation, the other as a retirement that keeps not happening, and both are care that never gets coded as such.

This is dozens of families interviewed over a few months ^[4], which is qualitative and does not establish incidence in any particular workforce, and the record does not support a rate. What it does support is the price line: care costs have on the whole risen faster than consumer prices, with some families funding more than a decade of care out of savings ^[22], and the non-medical hourly median rose about 67% in seven years ^[19]. Business Insider attributes the increases to caregiver wages, insurance and transportation costs, the pandemic-era exit of care workers and immigration crackdowns, with some families pointing to private equity ownership of facilities ^[23]. Those pressures do not need a representative sample to reach a payroll.

The board-deck version of this is demographic and comfortably distant, a curve that bends sometime next decade, but the households in this reporting are paying now: Barton is 55 and has already put under $100,000 into two tiny homes in her yard for her two parents and her father-in-law ^[11]. The trade-off available this quarter is narrow. Subsidized backup care and scheduling latitude cost money in the current period and land on the benefits line, where a CFO can see them and cut them. Unplanned attrition among people carrying fifteen years of context costs money too, and lands in requisitions and rework, where nobody has to defend it. Not measuring the exposure keeps the same cost sitting on the line that never gets argued.