Working Caregivers and Dementia: The Hidden Cost to Employers, and What Actually Helps

The caregiving workforce you cannot see

In Harvard Business School's national study The Caring Company, 73% of employees reported having a current caregiving responsibility, yet the vast majority of employers were not tracking it, and only about 24% recognized that caregiving affected worker performance, even though more than 80% of caregiving employees said it did. That gap, between what employees carry and what employers see, is where good people slip away.

Dementia is a large and growing share of that hidden workforce. Nearly 13 million Americans provide unpaid care for someone with dementia, about two-thirds are women, and roughly 60% are employed.

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What caregiving actually costs employers

• 32% of employees have voluntarily left a job because of caregiving responsibilities.
• 36% of employees earning $100,000 or more said caregiving harmed their careers, and senior leaders were among the most likely to leave, meaning the cost concentrates in your most expensive, hardest-to-replace talent.

Those departures are only the visible layer. Beneath them sit absenteeism (going in late, leaving early, taking days off) and presenteeism (being at the desk but unable to focus). For dementia specifically, 57% of caregivers report going in late, leaving early, or taking time off because of caregiving. And the national wage figure is already large: the 2026 USC Cost of Dementia study puts lost wages at $23 billion and the value of unpaid dementia caregiving at $237 billion a year.

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Why dementia is the hardest kind of caregiving to hold with a job

Most caregiving tasks can be scheduled around work. Dementia's hardest symptom cannot. Because short-term memory is impaired, a person with dementia forgets they just called, often within minutes, so the same anxious call repeats, again and again, through the workday. Behavioral symptoms like this affect up to roughly 97% of people with dementia over the course of the illness.

An employee cannot be present in a client meeting when a parent is calling again and again through the afternoon, frightened and not remembering the last call. The phone is not a distraction they can switch off, because on the other end is someone they love, in distress. This is the mechanism behind the lost hours, and it is almost never named in a benefits conversation.

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Why the caregiver benefits you already offer miss it

Most caregiver benefits are valuable but aim at the wrong layer of the problem:

Common benefit	What it does	What it misses
Employee assistance program (EAP)	Counseling and referrals	Does not intervene in the daily crisis
Care navigation / referral line	Points to resources	The employee still has to answer every call
Backup or respite care credits	Covers hours of coverage	The calls continue even when someone else is present

Each helps around the edges. None of them answers the phone. So the single most disruptive part of a dementia caregiver's workday, the repetitive call, goes untouched, and the benefit goes underused.

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What a caregiver benefit employees actually use looks like

Utilization follows relevance. A benefit that solves a concrete, in-the-moment problem gets used; a general resource line often does not. For dementia caregivers, the concrete problem is the calls. The benefit that gets used is the one that answers them, so the employee can stay present at work while their loved one is still comforted.

That is what KindredMind was built to do. It is a voice companion that answers a loved one's repetitive, anxious calls in the family caregiver's own voice, grounded in that person's routines and what reassures them. It is privacy-first and fully caregiver-directed, and it is designed for exactly the moment an employee cannot pick up. It supports and amplifies the caregiver while meeting the loved one's need, rather than blocking the loved one.

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The return on investment

• Retention of expensive talent. Because caregiving departures skew toward senior and higher-earning employees, even a small reduction in caregiving-driven turnover protects outsized replacement costs.
• Fewer lost hours. Addressing the calls directly targets both absenteeism and presenteeism, the two ways caregiving quietly drains productivity.
• Gender equity that shows. Two-thirds of dementia caregivers are women; a benefit aimed at this burden is a concrete way to keep women on the career track.
• A benefit people feel. Relief in the hardest moment of the day builds loyalty in a way a brochure never will.

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How to build a dementia-aware caregiver benefit

1. Recognize caregiving openly. Survey your workforce so caregiving stops being invisible. You cannot support what you do not measure, and most employers are not measuring it.
2. Offer real flexibility for the unpredictable moments, not just scheduled leave. Dementia does not book appointments, and the hardest moments arrive mid-meeting, not on a planned day off.
3. Add a benefit that targets the hardest daily pattern, the repetitive distress calls, not just referral lines. Referrals point to resources; the calls still land on the employee.
4. Make enrollment frictionless and private, since caregivers rarely self-identify at work. If using the benefit requires disclosing a parent's diagnosis to a manager, most employees never will.
5. Measure what changes. Track utilization, retention, and absenteeism, and ask caregiving employees directly whether the benefit reaches the moments that actually pull them away from work.

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Frequently Asked Questions