Grandparents put $900 billion into raising American kids every year, and roughly 81% of that — $731 billion — is unpaid labor that never shows up on a pay stub, tax return, or GDP report.
That figure comes from AARP’s June 2026 research on what the organization is calling the “grandparent economy,” built from a survey of more than 3,300 U.S. grandparents age 35 and older conducted in late 2025. The full report breaks the $900 billion into two pieces: $172 billion in direct financial assistance grandparents hand their grandkids’ families each year, and $731 billion in the estimated market value of the unpaid childcare they provide instead of hiring it out.
The hours behind the number
Sixty-nine percent of grandparents surveyed said they provide some level of care for a grandchild, and among that group, the average comes out to more than 500 hours a year — call it roughly 10 hours a week, every week, on top of whatever else is going on in a grandparent’s life. Fifteen percent said they provide care daily or almost daily, which functionally makes them a second set of parents rather than an occasional babysitter.
Put those hours next to a childcare center’s hourly rate in most U.S. metro areas and the $731 billion valuation stops looking like a marketing number and starts looking conservative. AARP’s researchers arrived at it the same way economists value any unpaid labor: by pricing the hours at what it would cost a family to buy the same care on the open market, then multiplying across the population of grandparents actually doing it.
It’s not just watching the kids
Ninety percent of grandparents surveyed said they give money directly to grandchildren or their parents — not loans, not gifts for birthdays, but ongoing financial support. The average works out to $2,654 a year per grandparent. AARP points out that figure alone exceeds the average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071, meaning a meaningful share of grandparents are handing over more in a year than a full month of the benefit many of them rely on themselves.
Forty-one percent said that money goes toward basic necessities — the stuff that keeps a household running, not extras. Eight percent said they’re covering medical, dental, or mental health costs their grandkids’ parents can’t fully absorb on their own. Independent coverage of the report framed the pattern the same way AARP did: grandparents are functioning as an informal safety net that shows up nowhere in federal family-support statistics, precisely because none of it is paid, contracted, or claimed.
Why families are leaning on grandparents harder
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Center-based childcare costs have climbed in most U.S. metro areas faster than wages have, and AARP’s researchers frame the grandparent economy explicitly as a release valve for that pressure — a way parents keep working without paying market rate for the hours grandma or grandpa cover for free. Every hour a grandparent takes is an hour a family isn’t paying a daycare, a nanny, or an after-school program to cover, and at 500-plus hours a year for 69% of grandparents, that’s a lot of hours quietly keeping household budgets and two-income schedules intact.
A shrinking group carrying more weight
The demographic backdrop makes the total more striking, not less. AARP counts about 65 million grandparents in the U.S. today, down from 70 million in 2018 — a smaller pool of people collectively doing more caregiving and giving more money than before. The average grandparent in the survey has five grandchildren, and 23% report having at least one grandchild who is multiracial or of a different ethnic background than themselves, a reminder that “grandparent economy” describes an enormously varied set of households, not a single archetype.
Despite the hours and the money, 79% of grandparents called the experience extremely or very fulfilling — which is either the most heartening detail in the whole report or the most convenient one, depending on how you look at a system that runs this well on labor nobody’s required to pay for. Either way, the $900 billion doesn’t show up in a budget line anywhere. It shows up in the fact that a lot of American families would have to make very different choices tomorrow if grandma and grandpa stopped showing up today.
