Key Facts & Findings
- 748 million working-age people, 708 million of them women, were outside the global labor force in 2023 due to unpaid care responsibilities, a third of all working-age people outside the labor force.
- The population aged 80 and older is projected to exceed the number of infants worldwide by the mid-2030s, a milestone that will sharply raise demand for intensive, hands-on care.
- Unpaid care work is valued at close to $11 trillion annually, a figure that remains outside standard GDP accounting.
- Women perform more than three-quarters of global unpaid care time; in Asia-Pacific, the ratio is roughly four to one.
- The OECD identifies falling fertility, rising childlessness, geographic family dispersion, and higher female employment as simultaneous drivers shrinking the informal caregiver supply.
- Meeting projected 2030 care needs through a “high road” investment scenario would require care spending equal to about 18.3% of global GDP, according to ILO modeling.
In 2023, 748 million people of working age were outside the global labor force because of unpaid care responsibilities, nearly a third of everyone not participating in paid work worldwide. Of that group, 708 million were women. That single statistic, released by the International Labour Organization in late 2024, captures something bigger than a labor market footnote: it marks the point where population change and the economics of care became the same story.
For decades, care was treated mainly as a household matter, occasionally a healthcare policy question, and rarely a demographic one. That framing no longer fits. The number of people who need care is rising because the number of people living into their 80s, 90s, and beyond is rising faster than at any point in recorded history, while the number of people traditionally available to provide that care (adult children, siblings, extended family) is shrinking because of falling fertility. The result is a structural mismatch between care demand and care supply that is now visible in labor statistics, government budgets, and household time-use surveys across income levels.
This article treats care as a population outcome: a direct consequence of how many people are being born, how long people are living, how households are shaped, and how women’s labor force participation has changed. It is not a healthcare explainer or an employment policy brief. It is a demographic accounting of who needs care, who provides it, and why that balance is shifting.
What Is the Care Economy?
The care economy covers both paid and unpaid work that meets the needs of people who require support because of age, illness, or disability, plus the domestic labor, cooking, cleaning, transportation, that sustains a household. The ILO defines it as encompassing “care work, paid and unpaid, direct and indirect, delivered through the public and private sectors, including MSMEs, non-profit organizations, the social and solidarity economy, and households.”
Three distinctions matter for understanding the data that follows:
- Direct versus indirect care. Direct care is hands-on: feeding an infant, bathing an elderly parent, administering medication. Indirect care is the domestic labor that supports the household in which care happens, cooking, laundry, shopping.
- Paid versus unpaid. Paid care includes nurses, home health aides, childcare workers, and domestic workers. Unpaid care is provided by family members, most often women, without direct monetary compensation.
- Formal versus informal. Formal care is delivered through institutions, hospitals, nursing homes, licensed daycare. Informal care happens inside households and kinship networks, largely outside any regulatory or statistical system.
This last distinction explains a persistent measurement problem: national accounts built around market transactions systematically understate the scale of unpaid care, because time spent caring for a parent or child rarely appears in GDP. Researchers using time-use surveys estimate the global value of unpaid care work at close to $11 trillion annually, a figure that exists entirely outside conventional economic statistics.
Why Population Change Is Increasing Demand for Care
The demand side of the care economy is being driven by four converging demographic forces.
The older population is growing in absolute terms and as a share of the total.
According to the UN Population Division’s World Population Prospects 2024 revision, the share of the global population aged 65 and older nearly doubled between 1974 and 2024, rising from 5.5% to 10.3%. Between 2024 and 2074, that share is projected to double again, to 20.7%. In raw numbers, there were roughly 703 million people aged 65 or older as of the most recent UN DESA estimate, a figure projected to reach 1.5 billion by 2050.
The oldest-old population, the group with the highest care needs, is growing fastest of all.
The UN projects that by the mid-2030s, the number of people aged 80 and older will exceed the number of infants globally for the first time in history, reaching roughly 265 million. By the late 2050s, more than half of all deaths worldwide will occur at age 80 or older, compared with 17% in 1995, a direct signal of how much further into old age populations are now living.
Life expectancy keeps climbing.
Global life expectancy at birth reached 73.3 years in 2024, recovering from a pandemic-era dip, and is projected to reach 77.4 years by 2054. More years of life mean more years in which chronic conditions, mobility limitations, and cognitive decline can accumulate, and more years during which some form of care becomes likely.
Fertility decline is shrinking the pool of people historically expected to provide that care.
The global fertility rate fell to 2.3 births per woman in 2024, down from roughly one birth per woman higher in 1990. Fewer children mean smaller sibling networks to share caregiving duties for aging parents, and in a growing number of countries, more people reaching old age without any children at all.
Population Age Structure and the Care Demand Trajectory
| Indicator | Historical / Current Figure | Projection | Source Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of population aged 65+ | 5.5% (1974) → 10.3% (2024) | 20.7% by 2074 | UNFPA/UN DESA, 2024 |
| Population aged 65+ | ~703 million (current) | 1.5 billion by 2050 | UN DESA |
| Population aged 80+ | Exceeds infant population by mid-2030s | ~265 million by mid-2030s | UN WPP 2024 |
| Share of deaths occurring at 80+ | 17% (1995) | Over 50% by late 2050s | UN WPP 2024 |
| Global life expectancy at birth | 73.3 years (2024) | 77.4 years (2054) | UN WPP 2024 |
| Global total fertility rate | 2.3 births per woman (2024) | Continued decline in most regions | UN WPP 2024 |
The Caregiver Population Is Changing Too
Family caregivers
Historically, most direct care has come from family members: spouses caring for each other in old age, adult children caring for aging parents, and, increasingly documented in the research literature, grandparents caring for grandchildren. This system depended on large extended families with multiple adult children able to divide caregiving responsibilities, and on family members living near enough to provide regular, hands-on support.
Paid care workers
The paid segment of the care economy, nurses, home health aides, childcare workers, and domestic workers, is itself demographically skewed. According to the ILO, 65% of care economy workers globally are women, and the sector is characterized by comparatively low pay, limited social protection, long hours, and significant occupational health exposure. Much of this workforce, particularly in domestic and home-based care, is made up of migrant workers, with South Asia identified by the ILO as a primary source region for care worker migration.
The gender structure of caregiving
The gender imbalance in care work is one of the most consistent findings in global labor statistics. Women perform more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work time worldwide. In the Asia-Pacific region specifically, women spend roughly four times as many hours on unpaid care as men, according to ILO research. Family responsibilities are estimated to account for up to 80% of the gender employment gap in high-income countries and up to 62% in low-income countries, meaning caregiving obligations, more than any other single factor, explain why women’s labor force participation trails men’s globally.
The Demographic Squeeze on Family Care
The OECD has identified a specific set of demographic mechanisms reducing the supply of informal, family-based care even as demand for it rises:
- Smaller sibling networks. Lower fertility over the past half-century means fewer adult children are available to divide eldercare responsibilities among themselves.
- Rising childlessness. A growing share of people in high-income countries reach older age with no children, removing the most common source of informal eldercare entirely.
- Geographic dispersion. Internal and international migration mean adult children increasingly live in different cities or countries from aging parents, making hands-on daily care logistically difficult regardless of willingness.
- Higher female labor force participation. As more women, historically the default informal caregivers, enter and remain in paid employment, the time available for unpaid family care shrinks even as demand grows.
- Longer parental survival. Because parents are living longer, adult children are increasingly providing eldercare at the same time they are supporting their own children, a demographic overlap examined in depth in coverage of the so-called sandwich generation.
How the Care Economy Differs Across Countries
Care systems vary substantially by income level and policy design. High-income countries with developed welfare states, much of Western Europe, for example, tend to combine publicly subsidized formal care services with residual family responsibility.
Countries with weaker public care infrastructure but strong extended-family norms, common across parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, rely far more heavily on unpaid family labor, often supplemented by low-cost domestic workers in middle- and upper-income households. Rural populations in most regions have systematically less access to formal care services than urban populations, regardless of country income level, meaning family caregiving remains the default option even where it is becoming demographically harder to sustain.
The Economic Value of Unpaid Care
Unpaid care work does not appear directly in GDP because it involves no market transaction, but researchers have developed methods, primarily based on time-use surveys and opportunity-cost or replacement-cost valuation, to estimate its scale. The commonly cited figure of roughly $11 trillion annually reflects one such estimate; the methodology assigns a monetary value to hours spent on unpaid care and domestic work based on what it would cost to purchase equivalent services or on the wages foregone by the person providing care.
Neither approach is a precise national accounting measure, but both converge on the same conclusion: unpaid care is a multi-trillion-dollar input to the global economy that conventional statistics do not capture.
The more measurable economic cost is opportunity cost at the individual level. The ILO’s 2023 estimate that 748 million working-age people are outside the labor force due to care responsibilities represents a direct, quantifiable loss of potential labor force participation, concentrated overwhelmingly among women.
What Happens as Care Demand Continues to Rise?
The ILO’s 2015 “Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work” report estimated that 2.1 billion people were in need of care globally in 2015, 1.9 billion children under 15 and 200 million older persons, and modeled that doubling investment in care services by 2030 could create 269 million additional jobs beyond the 2015 baseline, reaching 475 million total care jobs. That investment path would require public and private care spending equivalent to roughly 18.3% of projected global GDP, according to the same report.
Whether that investment materializes remains an open policy question. What is not in question is the underlying demographic trajectory: the population needing care is growing, the traditional unpaid caregiving workforce is shrinking relative to demand, and the paid care workforce, currently characterized by low wages and high turnover in many countries, will need to expand substantially to fill the gap. In June 2024, ILO member states adopted the first global tripartite resolution on decent work and the care economy, explicitly linking future labor market stability to investment in care infrastructure.
Conclusion
The care economy is not primarily a healthcare story or an employment story. It is a population story. Every driver of rising care demand, from the growth of the 80-plus population to the shrinking of family networks able to provide informal support, traces back to the same underlying demographic shifts: longer lives and fewer births.
The 748 million people currently outside the labor force due to care responsibilities are the visible edge of a structural transition that will deepen as the world’s oldest-old population continues to expand faster than any other age group. How societies respond, through public investment, paid care workforce expansion, or continued reliance on unpaid family labor, will shape not just care outcomes but labor markets and gender equity for decades to come.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the global care economy?
It is the combined system of paid and unpaid work that meets people’s care needs, childcare, eldercare, disability support, and the domestic labor that sustains households, delivered through families, formal care institutions, and paid care workers.
2. Why is population aging increasing care demand?
Because the number of people at the oldest ages, where care needs are most intensive, is growing faster than the overall population. The UN projects the 80-plus population will exceed the infant population globally by the mid-2030s.
3. Who provides most unpaid care?
Women. Global time-use data shows women perform more than three-quarters of unpaid care work worldwide, and 708 million women were outside the labor force in 2023 specifically due to care responsibilities.
4. How does declining fertility affect caregiving?
Lower fertility shrinks the pool of adult children available to share eldercare responsibilities and increases the share of older people who have no children to rely on for informal support.
5. Is unpaid care work included in GDP?
No. Because it involves no market transaction, unpaid care is excluded from standard GDP calculations, though researchers estimate its value using time-use and opportunity-cost methods at close to $11 trillion globally each year.
6. Will the world face a shortage of paid care workers?
Existing projections suggest care workforce needs will grow substantially as populations age, though whether supply keeps pace depends on wages, working conditions, and public investment, factors that vary significantly by country.
7. What is the difference between formal and informal care?
Formal care is delivered through regulated institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, or licensed childcare centers. Informal care happens within households and kinship networks and is far harder to measure statistically.
8. Which region has the largest gender gap in unpaid care work?
ILO data shows the Asia-Pacific region has one of the largest documented gaps, with women spending roughly 4.1 times more hours on unpaid care than men.
9. How much would closing the global care investment gap cost?
ILO modeling estimated that reaching a “high road” scenario of 475 million care jobs by 2030 would require public and private care spending equivalent to about 18.3% of projected global GDP.
10. How is the care economy connected to women’s employment?
Family care responsibilities are estimated to account for up to 80% of the gender employment gap in high-income countries and up to 62% in low-income countries, making caregiving the single largest documented barrier to women’s labor force participation globally.
Sources
- International Labour Organization, “Advancing decent work and the care economy,” 2025.
- International Labour Organization, “Unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market,” October 2024.
- International Labour Organization, “Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work,” 2018.
- International Labour Organization, “Women do 4 times more unpaid care work than men in Asia and the Pacific.”
- United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024: Summary of Results, UN DESA Population Division, July 2024.
- United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), “Ageing,” data page.
- New Security Beat / APEC Embracing Carers Policy Toolkit, “Unpaid Care Work: The Invisible and Sustaining Powerhouse,” 2024.
