For HR & benefits leaders
Eldercare Capacity Estimator
Estimate how much working capacity eldercare coordination is absorbing inside your workforce, in hours and in dollars. This is an exposure estimate, not a return-on-investment claim — no fee, no multiple, no payback. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent, saved, or shared.
Wages plus benefits, taxes, and overhead — not base salary.
40 hours a year is about 46 minutes a week, or 5 working days.
What this measures: work time an employee spends on the administrative side of a parent’s care — on hold with the insurer, rescheduling a specialist, sitting in a hospital discharge-planning call, comparing assisted-living options, talking to the elder-law attorney or the hospice team. It lands inside the workday for one reason: those offices are only open during the workday.
What it does not measure: hands-on care. Bathing, driving, visits, overnight supervision. That time is real and usually much larger — but it falls on evenings and weekends, and it does not come out of your payroll.
Judging the number: ours is an assumption, not evidence. If 46 minutes a week sounds high for your workforce, lower it. If you have watched someone manage a parent’s hospital discharge from their desk, it may sound low. The useful question is not whether 40 is right — it is where the number stops being small enough to ignore.
Modeled annual capacity value
The estimate, step by step
| Step | Input | Result |
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If your workforce skews older, this is probably conservative. BLS reports eldercare prevalence rising to 18.8% at ages 45–54 and 24.1% at ages 55–64 — but those are rates for all adults in those age bands, while the 13.5% above is the rate for employed people. BLS does not publish age by employment status, so we do not age-adjust this estimate. We would rather understate the number than blend two different measures to inflate it.
What this model assumes — and what it deliberately leaves out
- 13.5% eldercare prevalence. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unpaid Eldercare in the United States, 2023–24, Table 1, Employed row. A neutral national baseline — not a claim about your workforce. The age figures BLS publishes (18.8% at 45–54, 24.1% at 55–64) are for all adults, not employed adults, so they indicate direction only and are not used in this calculation.
- Affected work hours is an assumption, not evidence. We start at 40 per caregiver per year and invite you to change it. AARP reports 26 hours per week of total caregiving — that is not lost work time, and the two must not be confused.
- One input, not four. We deliberately do not add unplanned absence, reduced schedules, leave and turnover on top of affected hours. The same caregiving event would be counted two or three times.
- No dollar figure on turnover. If you want one, apply your own cost-to-replace to your own caregiving-attributed exits. Those are numbers you own and we don’t.
- Gross is not addressable. Only part of this exposure can be influenced, and which part depends on the cause — preventable, compressible, unavoidable, or downstream. Any provider promising to recover the gross number is selling you something we wouldn’t buy either.
Want these numbers on your actual workforce?
The 48-hour workforce assessment returns a custom 6-page report — your headcount, your industry, your benefits stack, with an indicative price and payback timing. No demo call. No credit card.
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David Moyer, CSA — CEO, ElderHonor · Audubon, PA
hello@elderhonor.com · +1 610-487-0273
Independent · not affiliated with Honor Technology, Inc. or Home Instead.
- Caregiving in the U.S. 2025 — National Alliance for Caregiving & AARP. Caregiver prevalence and weekly care hours.
- The Caring Company — Fuller & Raman, Harvard Business School, 2019. 67% miss-work rate; 32% higher quit rate.
- The Caregiving Landscape — Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers. Aggregate employer cost.
- Workplace Outcome Suite, Global Report No. 6 (2024) — EAPA. Published EAP outcome benchmarks.
Figures are modeled and indicative. Your actual quote and results depend on your workforce, industry, and contract terms.