New Care Board data release offers up-to-date insights on care within households and in the labor market

LAWRENCE — Newly released data on The Care Board will expand the type of data and methods available for understanding the care economy in the United States. Developed by researchers at the University of Kansas, the Care Board publishes statistics from several high-quality sources to show the magnitude of care work inside homes and care jobs as a share of the national economy. 

Care work is a broad category that includes professional, measured, compensated labor such as work done by nurses, teachers, occupational therapists and housekeepers. Care work also includes unpaid, informal work such as a parent supporting a young child, adults assisting their older parents with grocery shopping or medication, or someone helping a friend travel to medical appointments.   

“Since the beginning of economic measurement, care work has taken a back seat, often invisible. Yet it is what sustains us, builds the next generation and ensures a healthy workforce. It’s time we start accurately measuring this critical infrastructure,” said Misty Heggeness, professor of public affairs and economics and principal investigator for The Care Board.

In the 2026 data release, the Care Board offers new descriptions for care within households, across places and in the labor market. The new data shows increases in both the paid and unpaid care workforce estimate. The paid care workforce now approaches 48 million workers in the U.S. The unpaid care workforce has grown since the last data release in 2024 by about 1.3%, so the estimated number of U.S. adults recording at least three hours of unpaid care per day now numbers 156.6 million.

The data also updates estimates about the scope of the sandwich generation, meaning adults who care for both children and older adults. Nearly 5 million adults in the U.S. meet this definition, and members of the sandwich generation commit 45.53 million hours of care per day. While these figures reflect a decrease from previous estimates, the concentration of care work affects a meaningful proportion of American adults.

Figure: Data in the October 2026 release show that mothers have a smaller earnings share (33.1%) compared to fathers (66.9%) and that mothers provide an estimated 43.6 hours of care per week, or about 53% more care time per mother than fathers, who provide about 28.6 hours of care per week. Data is based on The Care Board calculations using U.S. Census Bureau & Bureau of Labor Statistics data via IPUMS. 

New published measures include information about maternal share of parental earnings and detailed parental employment indicators. Data shows a 20-percentage-point gap in parents’ labor force participation. That is, about 74.5% of mothers are actively working or looking for work, and about 94.6% of fathers are actively working or looking for work. 

The gap is more pronounced in families with younger children: When there are children ages 5 and younger in a household, 67.9% of mothers participate in the labor force compared with 95.5% of fathers. 

Measures in this release also include an indicator of care privilege, which calculates the share of adults living with others who spend less time providing unpaid care work than adults living alone do. This indicator of time use suggests that 98.4 million people spend less time on daily living and health activities than other adults.

“Able-bodied, working-age adults whose care is provided for them — like meals, clean clothes and child care — often struggle to understand the real effort involved in care maintenance. The ‘care privileged’ often occupy seats in Congress and executive leadership positions across the country,” Heggeness said. “These are the leaders who we hope to inspire with the Care Board by supporting their ability to make data-driven decisions on care policies and programs that would benefit all of us but especially would equalize the inequality of care provision in the U.S.” 

Another new measure, the Care Resource Equity Score (CaRES), assesses the concentration of care jobs and the care employment share in the economy for each of 47 states. Understanding whether care work is distributed across a geography and in what proportion to the overall state economy can show where conditions are favorable for people who need paid professional care, said Heggeness, who is also co-director of the Kansas Population Center and a research scientist at the Institute for Policy & Social Research.

This measure tells only part of the story, though, and does not show whether care services are high-quality, affordable or accessible to those who need them, Heggeness said. The Kansas CaRES is measured at 0.37, lower than the national average score of 0.41. This indicates a more favorable combination of the geographic distribution of care resources and share of care employment in Kansas compared with the rest of the U.S. In both Kansas and the U.S., though there are pockets where formal institutional care support is lacking given the upcoming needs of the population.

New data, measures, visualizations and methodologies are available at The Care Board.