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Most organizations are looking at the symptoms. Here is the variable underneath them that rarely makes it into your data.

Your workforce data is telling you something. Burnout is up. Voluntary turnover is stubbornly high. RTO mandates are generating more friction than expected. Certain employees, disproportionately women, are quietly stepping back from stretch assignments or passing on promotions without fully explaining why.

You have probably attributed these signals to a mix of factors: economic anxiety, post-pandemic fatigue, generational shifts in how people relate to work. Those factors are real. But there is another variable running underneath much of it that rarely gets named in an exit interview, never shows up in your HRIS with a label, and almost never surfaces in a performance review.

It is caregiving. And it is almost certainly affecting more of your workforce than your data suggests.

The symptoms are real. The diagnosis might be wrong.

The visible signals are easy to misread because they look like other problems.

An employee requests two work-from-home days per week. Another asks to shift their start time to accommodate school pickup. Someone who has been high-performing for years becomes less available, slower to respond, quicker to decline anything discretionary. A colleague takes a week off when a parent is hospitalized, comes back looking depleted, and gives notice three months later.

Each of these looks like an engagement issue, a flexibility preference, or a personal circumstance. Collectively, they represent maybe 10 percent of caregiving pressure that is actually visible. The other 90 percent is not showing up in your data at all, because no one has connected it to caregiving. Not your employees. Not your HR systems.

That is not a failure of data collection. It is a structural feature of how caregiving stress works: cumulative, private, and almost never disclosed until it has already done significant damage.

The research is unambiguous, and it is recent. The scale might surprise you.

According to the Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 Report, nearly one in four Americans is a family caregiver today. That represents a 45 percent increase since 2015. This is not a slow-moving demographic shift. It is already inside your workforce, and it is growing.

Nearly 30 percent of those caregivers are what researchers now call sandwich caregivers: simultaneously caring for an aging parent and a child under 18 at home. One 2026 survey (A Place for Mom 2026 Report) found that almost half of all caregivers fall into this category when you broaden the definition slightly. These are not employees with one competing priority. They are employees managing two unpaid roles alongside their paid work, averaging 27 hours of caregiving per week, with 24 percent providing 40 or more hours.

Caregiving experts and researchers have started calling this the Panini Generation, because unlike the sandwich generation of a decade ago, these employees are not just pressed from two sides. They are compressed from every direction at once.

And the toll on health? It’s significant and well-documented:

Between 40 and 70 percent of caregivers show clinically significant symptoms of depression (CDC, 2024)
More than 22 percent experience frequent mental distress
Only one in four reports good physical health
Caregivers fare worse than non-caregivers across 13 of 19 major health indicators, including obesity, asthma, and arthritis: conditions that show up directly in your healthcare claims
64 percent report emotional stress from caregiving (A Place for Mom, 2026)
42 percent experience emotional strain or burnout at least weekly. Not occasionally. Weekly.

And this is before you layer on everything else your workforce is carrying right now: economic pressure, cost-of-living stress that is not abstract for most households, and a news cycle that has been relentlessly difficult for years.

That pressure does not stay at home. It comes to work every day. It just does not announce itself.

Why it shows up the way it does

Here is the part that makes this so difficult to track: many of the employees carrying the heaviest caregiving loads do not think of themselves as caregivers at all.

They think of themselves as a daughter managing her mother’s discharge from the hospital while fielding calls from a rehab facility she has never heard of. A father spending his lunch break on hold with an insurance company to approve his son’s therapy. A parent who stayed up until 1 a.m. researching specialists after their teenager received a diagnosis they do not yet understand. A spouse whose partner’s chronic illness has quietly reorganized every logistical corner of their life.

None of these people are going to check the “caregiver” box on a benefits survey. The data confirms it: the Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 report cites that only 49 percent of employed caregivers have told their supervisor about their caregiving responsibilities.

Half of the modern caregiving workforce is managing this entirely out of sight.

They find workarounds. They absorb the friction. They give up the promotion because the travel requirement is incompatible with their life right now, but they do not say that when they decline it. They comply with the return-to-office mandate for a few months and then leave, citing a better opportunity elsewhere, because they cannot sustain the commute on top of everything else.

That quiet exit has a number attached to it. The AARP U.S. Workforce Report 2024 puts it at 16 percent of caregivers who have left a job specifically because caregiving responsibilities became unmanageable. In most exit data, that causation is invisible. It gets coded as compensation, career growth, or culture fit.

You are not misreading your people. This is not a failure of insight. It is a gap the modern workplace was never designed to close.

“16 percent of caregivers have already left a job specifically because caregiving responsibilities became unmanageable. In most exit data, that causation is invisible. It gets coded as compensation, career growth, or culture fit.”

So, what do you do with this?

Start by recognizing that a meaningful portion of the turnover, disengagement, and friction you are already trying to solve has a specific, addressable root cause.

And general programs are not reaching it, because caregivers are not identifying themselves as the intended audience.

The operational impact alone is hard to ignore. The Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 report found that half of all working caregivers report going in late, leaving early, or taking time off because of their caregiving responsibilities. That is not a fringe population with an unusual problem. That is a significant share of your workforce managing a competing demand that most benefits programs were not designed to address.

According to Gallup, burnout linked to caregiving costs employers between $4,200 and $20,000 per affected employee annually. That range is wide because it depends on how late the intervention arrives. The earlier the support, the lower the cost. That is not a wellness philosophy. That is a straightforward financial argument.

“Giving people access to self-directed resources isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a cornerstone of effective stepped-care. When employees can get support early, they’re less likely to rely on more costly interventions later. That’s where real savings and real impact begin.” — Terri-Lynn Mackay, Director, Behavioral Health Innovation and Service Delivery, LifeSpeak

Support that is explicitly designed for caregivers, accessible before the crisis point, and extended to family members, not just the employee, reaches people at the stage where intervention still has traction. When employees can access that support without having to declare an emergency, without having to identify as a caregiver, without having to ask their manager for accommodation first, more of them will.

The downstream effects on retention, healthcare utilization, and engagement will show up in data you are already tracking. That is the point.

Reactive support helps people get through. Proactive design helps them stay.

The research goes deeper. So does the solution.

Caregiving Through a Talent Lens goes further. It builds the complete argument for why caregiver support belongs in your workforce strategy, with the research on health outcomes and retention, a look at what integrated support covers across every caregiving stage, and a practical checklist for benefits and people strategy leaders who are ready to act.

Download the guide here, or learn more about our Parenting & Caregiving wellness track.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know how many caregivers are actually in my workforce? Most organizations undercount significantly. A simple anonymous survey asking employees whether they provide regular support to a family member, including aging parents, children with complex needs, or a partner managing a chronic illness, typically surfaces a much larger population than HR expects. According to the Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 report, nearly one in four Americans is a family caregiver today, a 45 percent increase since 2015. In some industries that figure climbs to three in four. Starting with an internal baseline is the most useful first step.

Why don’t caregivers tell HR or their managers what they are dealing with? Several reasons, and they compound each other. Many do not identify with the word “caregiver” even when they are carrying a substantial caregiving load. Others fear being perceived as less committed or less available for advancement. The Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 report found that only 49 percent of employed caregivers have told their supervisor about their caregiving role. The result is that the stress is present and affecting performance, but the cause never surfaces in any formal conversation.

Our EAP already covers caregiving referrals. Is that enough? EAP utilization rates for caregiving support tend to be low, for the same reason caregivers do not raise their hands: they do not see themselves as the intended audience, and they often do not reach out until the situation is already acute. Support that is always-on, self-directed, expert-led, and available before the crisis point consistently reaches a larger share of the caregiving population at the stage when earlier intervention is still possible.

Is caregiving stress really driving RTO friction, or is that about something else? It is rarely one thing. But caregivers are disproportionately affected by return-to-office mandates because remote or flexible work is often the primary accommodation that allows them to hold both roles together. When that flexibility is removed without alternative support, the calculus shifts. Some employees absorb it. Others leave. According to AARP, the ones who leave rarely cite caregiving in the exit conversation, which is precisely why this dynamic is so easy to misread.

What is the business case for caregiver-specific support rather than general wellness programs? General wellness programs are not reaching caregivers at the rate they should, because caregivers are not self-identifying as the target audience. Support that is explicitly framed around the real situations employees are navigating achieves higher utilization and earlier intervention. The downstream effect shows up in the metrics you are already tracking: absenteeism, healthcare claims, voluntary turnover, and engagement scores.

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