Elderly Caregivers Increasingly Common in Japanese Households
The people looking after elderly family members in Japanese households are often elderly themselves.
In 2025, a remarkable 37.1% of Japanese households providing care for a family member had both the caregiver and the care recipient aged 75 or older, marking the highest percentage ever recorded and a 1.4 percentage point increase from the 2022 survey. This trend is attributed to the aging society in Japan, where the baby-boom generation, born between 1947 and 1949, are now all 75 or over.
As of 2025, 55.1 million households in Japan include at least one person 65 or older, with more than half (27.6 million) having senior citizens as members. The majority of these households consist of a single senior person or a senior couple, driving the rise in elderly caregivers. Women make up around 60% of single-person senior households, a result of women's typically longer life expectancy leading to more households turning into single-person households after the death of the husband.
Written by urgent.news from Nippon.com's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
