Who Will Care for Grandma? AI-Exposed Jobs vs. Hands-On Caregiving

Disclaimer: General educational research only — not legal, tax or financial advice. Figures are survey-based estimates with the limits explained in the methodology. Verify with official sources and a qualified professional before making decisions.

Estate Planning Data & Research → Who Will Care for Grandma? AI-Exposed Jobs vs. Hands-On Caregiving

There’s a lot of talk about AI taking office jobs. There’s much less talk about the people who help an older parent shower, eat, take medicine, and get to the doctor. Those jobs are growing fast, and the data suggest AI won’t do them anytime soon.

We combined the newest federal job projections with four separate measures of AI exposure to compare hands-on care jobs with office and tech jobs. Then we asked what it means for families planning how to pay for a parent’s care.

Planning for a parent’s care is also a good time to get their legal documents in order, and your own. See whether you need a will, a living trust or both.

Key findings

• Home health and personal care aides will add more jobs than any other occupation in the country: about 847,300 new jobs from 2025 to 2035 (+18.1%). That’s roughly 1 of every 7 new U.S. jobs projected over the decade (the total is 5.92 million). Counting people who retire or change careers, there will be about 760,500 job openings for aides every year.
• Hands-on care is near the bottom on AI exposure.
  • BLS rates nursing assistants, orderlies, psychiatric aides, licensed practical nurses, and physical therapist aides and assistants “Low”, its lowest of four categories.
  • Anthropic’s measure of real AI use finds zero observed exposure for nursing assistants, LPNs, orderlies, and psychiatric aides, compared with 0.70 for customer service representatives.
  • Microsoft’s AI applicability score is 0.051 for home health aides and 0.408 for customer service reps.
• The people doing the work are among the lowest paid. The median home health and personal care aide earned $17.21 an hour in May 2025, compared with $24.51 for all U.S. workers. Rising demand plus low pay is the recipe for hard-to-find help and rising prices. That matters for any family budgeting for in-home care.

One honest caveat up front: BLS puts home health aides in its “Moderate” category (second-lowest) and registered nurses in “High,” probably because of the charting and paperwork in those jobs. BLS is clear that “exposure does not imply job loss.” It means AI could help with part of the work. Usage-based measures show far less actual AI use in nursing than in office work (RNs: 0.059 on Anthropic’s scale).

Care jobs vs. AI-exposed jobs, side by side

Notes:

• Jobs and openings come from the BLS 2025–35 projections.
• Pay is the national hourly median from OEWS, May 2025.
• BLS AI exposure is relative: about a quarter of occupations fall in each category.
• Microsoft and Anthropic scores run from 0 to 1; higher means more AI applicability or use.
• O*NET importance runs from 1 to 5.
• “Not scored” means that source had no value for the occupation.

Adding it up:

• The 14 care occupations above are projected to add about 1.39 million jobs over the decade.
• The 11 office and tech comparison jobs shrink by about 72,000 combined. That includes customer service representatives (−5.3%), bookkeeping clerks (−5.6%), and data entry keyers (−25.5%).
• BLS’s own notes on those jobs name AI. Customer service jobs are expected to shrink “as advances in speech and language processing and in artificial intelligence (AI) allow computers to handle customer service interactions with greater frequency.”

Why care work is hard to automate

ONET, the Labor Department’s database of what workers actually do, rates how important “Assisting and Caring for Others” is in each job on a 1–5 scale. Home health and personal care aides score 4.88, physical therapist assistants 4.99, and nursing assistants 4.56. Most of the office jobs in our table score between 1.9 and 3.3*. Medical secretaries, at 4.09, are the exception. Lifting, bathing, dressing, noticing that Dad seems confused today: that’s physical, in-person work, and it’s where AI tools show up least.

What this means for families

• Expect care to cost more, not less. AI may make some office services cheaper. Hands-on care is the opposite: demand is growing fastest in the jobs least likely to be replaced by software.
• Do the simple math early. At the May 2025 median aide wage of $17.21 an hour, 20 hours a week of help is about $17,900 a year in wages alone. Full-time (40 hours) is about $35,800. Agencies charge more than the wage to cover payroll taxes, insurance, training, and overhead, so treat these as floor amounts, not quotes. Compare them with nursing home costs in your state and our care cost vs. income comparison.
• Plan how care gets paid for. Long-term care is where family savings and the family home often go. Medicaid can step in, but it may later seek repayment from the estate. See Medicaid estate recovery by state and how much home equity Medicaid could take.
• Get the paperwork in place before a crisis. A durable power of attorney and health care directive let a trusted person hire help, pay caregivers, and talk to doctors. Start with essential estate documents, my parents are getting older, and the family conversation.
• If a family member is the caregiver, put the arrangement in writing (a personal care agreement). It protects everyone and can matter later for Medicaid. See protecting your parents’ legacy.

Methodology

• Projections and BLS AI exposure. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections 2025–35, released Aug. 27, 2026.
  • “AI exposure categories and 2025–35 employment projections” (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ind-occ-matrix/ai-exposure-categories.xlsx).
  • Occupation tables 1.2 and 1.12 (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ind-occ-matrix/occupation.xlsx).
  • Methodology: https://www.bls.gov/emp/publications/ai-exposure-categories.htm. BLS combined five external sources into four relative categories.
  • These replace the 2024–34 projections; we used the newest release.
• Wages. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 national data (https://www.bls.gov/oes/special-requests/oesm25nat.zip), hourly median.
• Microsoft. Tomlinson et al., “Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations” (arXiv 2507.07935), AI applicability scores v1.1 (https://github.com/microsoft/working-with-ai). Based on Bing Copilot conversations mapped to O*NET work activities.
• Anthropic. Massenkoff and McCrory, “Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence” (Mar. 5, 2026), “observed exposure” (job_exposure.csv in the Anthropic Economic Index dataset on Hugging Face).
  • It counts tasks that are theoretically doable with AI and actually show up in work-related Claude use, with automated use weighted more heavily.
  • Anthropic reports that 30% of workers have zero coverage.
• O*NET. ONET 31.0 database (db_31_0_text.zip from onetcenter.org), Work Activities file, element 4.A.4.a.5 “Assisting and Caring for Others,” importance scale. Averaged across ONET codes within each SOC code. For home health and personal care aides, we averaged the two detailed codes 31-1121 and 31-1122.
• Files. All files were downloaded Oct. 1, 2026. The final CSV is in the Downloads section above.
• Limits. These AI measures describe what AI could help with or is being used for, not who will lose a job. Different measures disagree. That’s why we show all of them.

FAQ

Will robots or AI replace home health aides?

Nothing in these data suggests that in the next decade. BLS projects 18.1% growth for aides, and usage-based AI measures show little or no AI use in hands-on care jobs.

Why does BLS rate registered nurses “High” for AI exposure?

Nursing includes a lot of documentation, care planning, and information work that AI tools can help with. BLS says exposure is relative and “does not imply job loss,” and it still projects RN employment to grow 5.6%.

Does this mean in-home care will get more expensive?

We can’t forecast prices from these data. But demand is growing fast and wages are low, a combination that makes staffing harder. Families should plan for costs to rise.

What’s the cheapest way to plan for a parent’s care?

Start early. Know what care costs where your parent lives, get a power of attorney and health care directive signed, and learn your state’s Medicaid rules before you need them.

Cite this data

Published October 1, 2026. Data vintage: BLS Employment Projections 2025–35 (released Aug. 27, 2026); OEWS May 2025; Microsoft Working with AI v1.1; Anthropic observed exposure (Mar. 2026); O*NET 31.0. Editorial standards.