The Only Income in the House
Dear friends,
Let me tell you about the sentence I keep hearing.
"I can't take leave. I'm the only one bringing in money."
It comes up in every conversation about caregiving, and I've started to think of the people who say it as the quietest group in this whole crisis. They aren't undecided about whether to care for a parent or a partner. They already are. They're just doing it while holding down a full-time job that their entire household depends on.
There are a lot of them. Nearly one in three family caregivers works full time while providing care. And the numbers behind that sentence are brutal.
Start with the law everyone is supposed to rely on. The Family and Medical Leave Act is thirty-two years old, and it still gives you twelve weeks. Unpaid. Job-protected, which is not nothing, but unpaid is the whole problem when you are the only income in the house. Twelve weeks unpaid is not leave. It's a bill you can't pay.
And the FMLA doesn't reach everyone. Small employers are exempt, and you need a year at your job. So the person who most needs it is often the one who can't get it.
Only fourteen states and the District of Columbia have built their own paid leave programs, and they aren't even holding steady. On October 1, Washington D.C. cut its paid family caregiving leave from twelve weeks to six, citing budget pressure. Six weeks, when recovering from a stroke can take a year.
Then there's the part that doesn't show up until much later.
The lifetime earnings loss for a caregiver who leaves work or cuts back is estimated at $303,880. Caregivers who start early can face a retirement shortfall of up to $295,000 by sixty-five. And the 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey found something that stopped me. Thirty-four percent of caregivers have less than ten thousand dollars in savings, compared with twenty-five percent of everyone else. They're also more likely to retire earlier than planned, and more likely to say their retirement isn't what they pictured.
That's what caregiving does to a person's future. Not a bad month. Not a tight year. A permanently smaller life after the care is over.
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I want to name the double bind clearly, because this isn't about better budgeting. Cutting hours means less income now, in the exact years the household can't lose any. Leaving work entirely means less Social Security later, less savings, and a career gap that never fully closes. The caregiver is paying for the care with their own old age. That's the system we built, or failed to.
So what would actually help? Specific things, and some already exist as bills.
The Social Security Caregiver Credit Act (S. 4396) and the Catching Up Family Caregivers Act (S. 4291), both introduced this spring, would begin to stop unpaid care from quietly shrinking a caregiver's retirement. As of this month, both are still sitting in committee. That's a choice, not a fate.
A federal caregiver tax credit would help too. The Credit for Caring Act has been waiting for a vote while families spend thousands of their own money a year on care.
A national paid family and medical leave standard would replace the patchwork of state programs and the cruel arithmetic of an unpaid federal law. And the FMLA itself could cover more people, for more kinds of care, with more time.
There's another number worth holding up next to all of it. Unpaid family care in this country is valued at more than a trillion dollars a year. We ask an enormous amount of working caregivers and reimburse almost none of it.
Here's what I keep coming back to. When Congress wrote the Family and Medical Leave Act, it assumed a two-earner household. It assumed someone else could keep the lights on while you stepped away. That was never true for everyone, and for a growing number of families it isn't true at all.
A person who is the only income in their house shouldn't have to choose between their parent's care and their own future. That's not a family problem. It's a structural one, and it's fixable.
Ask your representatives about the caregiver credit bills. Ask whether they support paid leave. Ask what a sole earner is supposed to do in the meantime. They won't have a good answer. That's the point.
Susan
Figures drawn from published research by AARP and the EBRI 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey, and from reporting on federal legislation. Lighthouse by Dragonfly is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any organization named, and we do not control their content. This letter is advocacy, not medical, legal, or financial advice.
