Twenty-one percent of grandparents logged more than 100 hours caring for a grandchild or great-grandchild over just a two-year stretch, according to a new Pew Research Center report released this week. That works out to roughly an hour a week, every week, for one in five grandparents in the country. The empty-nest image of grandparents as occasional visitors who show up for holidays and birthdays doesn’t match what the data actually shows. A huge share of them are functioning as regular, structural labor inside their families’ childcare arrangements, not as background characters in someone else’s parenting.
Key Points
- 21% of grandparents spent 100+ hours over the past two years caring for a grandchild, per Pew.
- Nationally, 69% of grandparents provide some level of regular care for a grandchild, according to AARP’s 2026 grandparents report.
- Among grandparents who provide childcare, the average is 510.9 hours a year, nearly 10 hours a week.
- Two-thirds of adults 65 and older were grandparents as of 2024, and the average grandparent is 68 years old.
- Grandparent caregiving and financial support together add up to roughly $903 billion a year in value nationwide, per AARP’s estimate.
- 8% of American children lived in a household headed by a grandparent in 2024, per Pew.
The closeness runs both directions
It isn’t just hours logged. Pew found 36% of adults describe their relationship with their grandparents as extremely or very close, with Black Americans reporting the highest rate of closeness at 49%. Contact is frequent, too: 70% of grandparents 65 and older are in touch with grandchildren at least a few times a month, and 15% connect daily or nearly every day. That kind of regular presence is hard to square with the stereotype of grandparents as retirees drifting off to the sidelines of family life.
The financial side tells a similar story. AARP’s research found nine in ten grandparents spend money directly on grandchildren, averaging $2,654 a year, and 41% help cover basic necessities like food, clothing, or housing costs. Fourteen percent said the support causes them real financial strain, which suggests a meaningful slice of grandparents are stretching their own retirement budgets to keep their grandchildren’s households afloat.
None of this is happening in some separate, formalized caregiving system that shows up in policy debates about child care costs. It’s happening quietly, inside ordinary families, absorbed into what people just call “helping out.” The scale of it is the part that keeps getting missed: a fifth of grandparents putting in triple-digit hours over two years isn’t a handful of especially devoted outliers. It’s a structural piece of how American families actually raise children, running largely uncounted and unpaid.
