---
title: Fourteen Million Americans Care for a Wounded Veteran at Home
description: RAND counts 14.3 million Americans caring for a wounded veteran at home. Most never use the word caregiver, and Elizabeth Dole spent her eighties on the count.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-07-28T07:56:41.042Z
updated: 2026-07-28T07:56:41.049Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/military-caregivers-14-million-count
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/dole-military-caregivers-count-55458.webp
categories: Culture & Society
content_type: News
region: United States
publication: Rich Woman Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

About 14.3 million Americans help a service member or veteran who came home wounded, ill or injured get through an ordinary day: eating and walking, the week's medication, the drive to the pharmacy and the grocery store, the appointments across town, the memory lapses, the mental health symptoms. Most of them have never called themselves a caregiver.

That is 5.5 percent of American adults, and for a long time nobody had a reliable count of them. RAND went looking on behalf of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation and published [what it found](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3212-2.html) in September 2024. The number came back far larger than earlier research had produced, and the reason was the question itself.

Earlier work asked people whether they were caregivers. Plenty said no, because the word sounds like it belongs to hospitals and agencies rather than to a daughter driving her father to his appointments. So RAND asked instead whether people did the specific things caregivers do. Its own 2014 study, using the older approach, counted 5.5 million military caregivers. Asking about the tasks found 14.3 million. They are not concentrated somewhere far off, either: more than half live in Southern or Western states and in urban areas, and Texas, California and Florida each have more than a million.

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