What’s missing from most policy conversations is the invisible load of unpaid care and its relationship to paid care. It’s a load typically carried by women, and ultimately contributes to gender inequity factors.
About a year ago, Deloitte Access Economics ran focus groups to understand carers’ experiences. Late one night, about 9:30 pm, four women logged onto a group, all clearly exhausted. They came to speak about the experience of being an unpaid carer to someone with a disability. In the group were a parent, a stepdaughter, a wife, and an aged, frail sister.
Though their situations were varied, they quickly found common ground. Sure, they found care work rewarding. But it has no boundaries. In every story, there are examples of physical, social and economic loss. Foregone work, reduced study, neglected health conditions.
Unpaid carers are the counterweight to all large Australian social security programs. Aged care, chronic illness, childcare, mental health, and disability. Each additional hour of unpaid care reduces the government’s social security burden — and so when services are cut, unpaid care is expected to rise.
Yet what it costs to provide this care – the personal cost, and the broader economic cost – is all but absent from policy discussion.
Unpaid care is the unspoken safety net that conveniently exists without a price tag. As a society, we are careless when we trade paid care for unpaid care.
Studies have estimated what it would cost if we paid unpaid carers at market rates, with estimates up to $153 billon per year. Women comprise about 70 per cent of these estimates. The fact that women often trade paid work for unpaid work contributes to persistent gender inequities in economic and financial outcomes.
Care work does not just come at the expense of paid work. There is also a known cost to personal welfare. As a society, we comfort ourselves that informal carers are ‘paid’ in satisfaction, love, and a glow of altruism. Scholars call this the ‘prisoner of love’: how can you demand recognition for your care work when it is so intrinsically rewarding? But Carers Australia’s 2025 survey found that 61.1 per cent of carers already have low wellbeing, compared to 33.6 per cent of adult Australians, with many reporting high psychological distress and loneliness. And only 50 per cent indicated that caring contributed to meaning and purpose in their life.
Indeed, econometric analysis finds that both measures of life satisfaction and mental health deteriorate with time spent caring for elderly or disabled relatives.
When experienced at scale across many carers, the effects of unemployment or underemployment, along with poor mental and physical health, translate to economy-wide outcomes.
In 2023, we estimated that every additional hour of NDIS core supports enabled seven more minutes of paid employment. This, in turn, feeds into economic value – driving up our GDP.
The Federal Budget in May introduced massive changes to the NDIS. The scheme will shrink by 160,000 participants by 2030. Costs will fall by $38 billion over four years, and growth will slow dramatically.
To achieve this, children and adults with mild to moderate disability will move onto new ‘foundational supports’ programs outside the NDIS. But these programs have not yet rolled out, creating uncertainty and confusion as people with disabilities and their carers are left without support in the transition to the new system.
And still there are those who call for more radical cuts to the NDIS.
There are many numbers that are notably absent from public discussion. If not managed carefully, some of the economic trade-offs become stark.
In the absence of adequate care systems, how many carers and people with disabilities will leave or reduce their paid employment to enable this change? Is there an estimate of the increased impost on the health system from carer burnout? What is the overall economic impact of that change to carer outcomes?
Failing to quantify the cost to unpaid carers in policy discussion ingrains a societal norm that care work is not valuable – indeed, some economists and commentators erroneously argue that the care economy detracts from productivity (as it is, limitedly, measured). It compromises the quality of decision-making in policy design. Would we choose a different path, a different investment option, or a different program if we forced ourselves to better understand the trade-offs as they relate to unpaid carers?
According to Australian Public Service guidance, this question should be answered via gendered data analysis, with the level of detail and depth proportional to the scale of proposed changes. The NDIS reforms dwarfed other changes in the Budget, necessitating a comprehensive and transparent gender analysis of their first- and second-order impacts on participants and their families. It still remains unclear whether this analysis was undertaken.
This is not another piece of writing debating the relative merits of the proposed NDIS changes. Rather, it is a call for policymakers to recognise that carers are the “system’s hidden shock absorber.” In times of great change and reform, we need to actively identify and quantify the financial, social and physical implications for unpaid carers of reducing the availability of paid care and cutting supports for our most vulnerable people.