Grandparents across the U.S. provide roughly $900 billion a year in combined financial support and unpaid childcare, according to a new AARP study of more than 3,300 grandparents, breaking down to $172 billion in direct financial support and $731 billion in the estimated value of unpaid caregiving hours.
Key Points
- Grandparents provide an estimated $900 billion combined annually — $172 billion in direct financial support, $731 billion in unpaid childcare value, per AARP’s new study.
- 69% of grandparents surveyed provide regular childcare, averaging more than 500 hours a year.
- Despite the time commitment, 79% of grandparents describe the caregiving role as genuinely fulfilling.
- The study surveyed more than 3,300 grandparents nationally on their financial and caregiving contributions to grandchildren.
The scale of the financial contribution puts grandparents in a category AARP’s researchers describe as an under-recognized pillar of family economics — a role that rarely shows up in official accounting of household support but that, in aggregate, rivals major categories of federal family spending.
“Grandparents are the backbone of so many American families, providing both financial and emotional support that often goes unrecognized,” said Dr. Debra Whitman, AARP’s chief public policy officer, in the organization’s release announcing the findings.
The 500-plus hours of annual caregiving reported by regular-caregiver grandparents works out to roughly 10 hours a week on average, a load AARP’s researchers note is comparable to a part-time job layered on top of grandparents’ existing responsibilities and, in many cases, their own employment or retirement plans.
Despite that load, the high fulfillment rate — nearly 8 in 10 grandparents calling the role rewarding — suggests the arrangement functions as mutually beneficial for many families rather than a one-sided burden, even as the financial and time commitment involved rivals formal childcare costs that would otherwise fall on parents directly.
The scale of the contribution also raises a policy question researchers have flagged for years: because so much of this support happens informally, within families, it rarely shows up in the public conversation about the cost of raising children the way daycare tuition or paid family leave does. AARP’s data suggests that gap in visibility doesn’t match the gap in actual dollars and hours involved, with grandparent support functioning as a de facto safety net for millions of working parents who might otherwise need to reduce hours or pay for formal childcare.
The study also points to a generational trade-off that rarely gets discussed alongside the fulfillment numbers: many of the grandparents providing this level of support are themselves still working, managing their own health needs, or trying to build retirement savings on a timeline the caregiving role can complicate. AARP’s broader research on caregiving has repeatedly found that unpaid family caregivers of any kind report higher financial strain than non-caregivers, even when the caregiving itself is described as meaningful.
