Unpaid parental caregiving often arrives when older workers make largely irreversible Social Security benefit claiming decisions. Using the Health and Retirement Study linked to Social Security administrative records, we examine how parental caregiving is related to claiming and labor supply. In married households, caregiving is associated with specialization: when one spouse provides care, the caregiver is 12 percentage points more likely to claim by age 64 and 11 percentage points less likely to work full time, while the non-caregiving spouse is about 10 percentage points less likely to claim early and 10 percentage points more likely to delay retirement. These patterns are robust to rich controls, individual fixed effects, subjective survival beliefs, and an instrumental-variables strategy using the presence of living parents and in-laws. Administrative benefit-type data further show that sole married caregivers are about 10 percentage points more likely to claim spousal benefits consistent with intra-household insurance through Social Security’s spousal provisions. We find no comparable effects of caregiving among non-married individuals. The results suggest that spousal benefits may buffer the retirement-income costs of family caregiving, and that reducing them could weaken this insurance channel.
Publication Type
Working Paper
File Description
First version March 4, 2026
JEL Codes
I14: Health and Inequality
J12: Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
J14: Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-labor Market Discrimination
J26: Retirement; Retirement Policies
H55: Social Security and Public Pensions