Carers and poverty

Around 1 in 10 adults in the UK (5.2 million people) are informal carers. Six in 10 carers live in families where someone is disabled, 6 in 10 are women, and 8 in 10 are of working age. Caring responsibilities vary in intensity: over half of carers (54%) provide fewer than 20 hours of care per week, while almost 2 in 5 (36%) provide 35 hours or more. A further 1 in 10 (10%) provide between 20 and 35 hours of care each week.

Informal carers are more likely to live in poverty than people without caring responsibilities (23% compared with 20%). Poverty rates are higher for working-age carers (25%) than for carers of pension age (15%), and higher for male carers than female carers across both age groups in the latest data.

The proportion of adults who are informal carers has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, fluctuating between around 8% and 11%. However, carers have consistently faced higher poverty rates than non-carers. As with disabled people, the gap in poverty rates widened after 2012/13 and remained broadly stable at around 3 percentage points until the pandemic. During the pandemic, the gap increased sharply to around 8 percentage points.