Grandparents across the country are collectively funneling $900 billion a year into their families, split between $172 billion in direct financial support and $731 billion worth of unpaid caregiving, according to AARP’s own newly released research. Broken down to a single household, the average grandparent spends $2,654 a year on their grandchildren, an amount that outpaces the typical monthly Social Security check of $2,071. Ninety percent of grandparents surveyed said they provide some form of financial help. This isn’t pocket money for birthdays. It’s rent, groceries, school supplies, and childcare hours that are quietly propping up younger families who might otherwise be stretched thin.
Where the $172 Billion Actually Goes
AARP’s report, titled “Powering Families: The Essential Role of Grandparents in Care, Connection and Support,” surveyed more than 3,300 nationally representative grandparents age 35 and older in late 2025. The financial piece isn’t limited to gifts at birthdays and holidays, though the report notes those are still the most common form of giving. Grandparents are also covering essentials like clothing, food, and school supplies, chipping in on childcare costs and camp tuition, and paying for family travel that keeps far-flung grandkids connected. Forty-one percent said they help cover basic necessities specifically, and 8 percent are contributing toward medical, dental, or mental health costs for a grandchild.
The Unpaid Hours Are Worth Even More Than the Cash
The caregiving side of the ledger dwarfs the direct spending. Sixty-nine percent of grandparents provide more than 500 hours of care to grandchildren annually, work that AARP values at $731 billion when totaled nationally. That’s the equivalent of a part-time job’s worth of hours for most of the grandparents doing it, on top of whatever they’re also handing over in cash. AARP’s own executive vice president and chief public policy officer, Dr. Debra Whitman, framed the finding around how central this generation has quietly become to family survival, a point echoed in trade coverage of the release from CPA Practice Advisor, which described grandparents as an often overlooked source of support for American households.
Most Say It Doesn’t Feel Like a Burden
What stands out in AARP’s numbers isn’t just the scale of the spending, it’s how grandparents describe it. Seventy percent said the financial support they provide hasn’t caused them any real sacrifice or strain, while 14 percent acknowledged it has. And 79 percent called the overall experience of supporting their grandchildren extremely or very fulfilling. That combination, real financial exposure alongside real personal satisfaction, is part of why this spending has stayed largely invisible in national economic conversations even as the dollar figures climbed into the hundreds of billions.
The Scale Behind the Number
Part of why these totals run into the hundreds of billions is simple math about how many grandparents there are and how many grandchildren each one has. Two-thirds of U.S. adults 65 and older were grandparents as of 2024, and the average grandparent has about six grandchildren, according to Pew Research Center’s most recent analysis. The average age of a grandparent in the U.S. is 68, meaning a large share of this spending is coming from people already living on fixed retirement income rather than peak-earning salaries. Multiply a modest few thousand dollars a year across that many households and that many grandchildren, and a $900 billion aggregate stops looking like an outlier and starts looking like simple arithmetic.
A Safety Net That Doesn’t Show Up on Any Balance Sheet
Coverage of the report has framed the trend as something closer to infrastructure than generosity. As one summary put it in reporting from WBUR’s Here & Now, grandparents are functioning as “a quiet safety net for the American economy,” stepping in with both money and time in ways that keep younger, financially squeezed families afloat. That framing matters because it treats grandparent support not as an occasional kindness but as a structural piece of how American households are actually getting by right now.
Nearly $2,700 a year, times tens of millions of grandparents, adds up to a number too large to keep calling incidental, and the people writing those checks mostly don’t think of themselves as an economic force at all. Most would describe what they’re doing in much smaller terms, covering a grandchild’s cleats, chipping in for braces, or taking the weekend shift so their own kids can catch a break, not participating in a $900 billion economic sector with a name.
