The senior population is booming. Caregiving is struggling to keep up

In November 2022, Beth Pinsker’s 76-year-old mother began to get sick.

Ann Pinsker, an otherwise healthy woman, had elected to have a spinal surgery to preserve her ability to walk after having back issues. What Ann and Beth had thought would be a straightforward recovery process instead yielded complications and infections, landing Ann in one assisted living facility after another as her daughter navigated her care.

Eventually, by July of the following year, Ann died.

“We thought she’d be back up to speed a few weeks after hospital stay, rehab, home, but she had complications, and it was all a lot harder than she thought,” Beth Pinsker, a certified financial planner and financial planning columnist at MarketWatch who has written a book on caregiving, told CNBC.

It wasn’t Pinsker’s first time navigating senior care. Five years before her mother’s death, she took care of her father, and before that, her grandparents.

But throughout each of those processes, Pinsker said she noticed a significant shift in the senior caregiving sector.

“From the level of care that my grandparents received to the level of care that my mom received, prices skyrocketed and services decreased,” she said.

It’s evocative of a larger trend across the sector as the senior population in the U.S. booms and the labor force struggles to keep up.

Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau found that the population of people ages 65 and older in the country grew from 12.4% in 2004 to 18% in 2024, and the number of older adults outnumbered children in 11 states — up from just three states in 2020.

Along with that population change came other shifts, including increased demand for care for older people.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the prices for senior care services are rising faster than the price of inflation. In September, the Consumer Price Index rose 3% annually, while prices for nursing homes and adult day services rose more than 4% over the same period.

But the labor force hasn’t necessarily kept up with the surge.

The demand for home care workers is soaring as the gap widens, with a projected 4.6 million unfulfilled jobs by 2032, according to Harvard Public Health. And McKnight’s Senior Living, a trade publication that caters to senior care businesses, found that the labor gap for long-term care is more severe than any other sector in health care, down more than 7% since 2020.