Executive summary
Ten findings that describe the aging-in-place market in September 2026. Each one is developed, charted and sourced in the sections that follow.
The demographic wave
The 65-and-over population passed 64 million in 2025 and is growing faster than any other age group. The steep part of the curve, the 80-plus years when care needs concentrate, starts now.
Americans aged 65+ and 85+, 2020 to 2060
Millions of people. 2020 to 2025 are Census population estimates; 2030 onward are the Census Bureau's 2023 main-series projections, which sit about 1.3 million below the newer estimates for 2025 because they were built on an earlier base.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates; 2023 National Population Projections, main series.
The 65+ population by age band, 2020 vs 2025
The leading edge of the baby boom is now crossing 75. The 75 to 79 band grew 30 percent in five years, three times the growth of the 65 to 69 band.
Source: Census Vintage 2025 state and national estimates by single year of age, civilian population, July 1 figures.
Older adults overtake children in 2029
Millions of people aged 65+ versus under 18, Census main-series projections. The often-quoted 2034 crossover comes from the superseded 2017 projections.
Source: Census 2023 National Population Projections, Table 2; 2018 release for the older 2034 estimate.
How older adults live
Living arrangements of community-dwelling adults 65 and over, 2023. Another 1.3 million older adults lived in nursing homes in 2022 (1 percent of those 65 to 74, 8 percent of those 85 and over).
Source: Administration for Community Living, 2023 Profile of Older Americans. "Other" is derived by subtraction.
Oldest states by share of population 65+, 2025
The national share is 18.9 percent. Utah (13.0 percent) and the District of Columbia (13.7 percent) are the youngest.
Source: Census Vintage 2025 state estimates by age. Full table in section 13.
Two numbers frame everything else. First, 4.18 million Americans turned 65 in 2025, the single largest year of the "Peak 65" period that runs from 2024 through 2027, and about 11,400 people a day. Second, the 85-and-over population, the group most likely to need daily help, is projected to roughly double between 2025 and 2040, from 7.0 million to 13.7 million. Women make up 62 percent of the 85-plus population today.
The wave is not evenly spread. The South's 65-plus population grew 17.5 percent between 2020 and 2025 against 14.6 percent in the Northeast. Delaware, New Hampshire, Idaho, Alaska and South Carolina posted the fastest 65-plus growth of any states, while Maine, Vermont and Hawaii carry the oldest age structures (section 13).
What older adults want
The preference to stay put is stable, strong and rises with age. What has changed is that older adults increasingly expect their homes will need work to make that possible.
Wanting to stay: home and community, by age
Share who want to remain in their current home, and in their current community, for as long as possible. Adults 18 to 49 shown for contrast.
Source: AARP, 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey (n=3,090, fielded June 17 to July 1, 2024).
What people plan to change
Among adults 50+ who anticipate modifying their home. Bathrooms and entries lead by a wide margin, which is also where remodelers report the most work (section 14).
Source: AARP 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey report page.
Why the 44 percent who expect to move would go
Share of adults 50+ who expect to relocate citing each reason. Cost, not preference, is what dislodges people from homes they want to keep.
Source: AARP, December 10, 2024 release on the 2024 survey.
Planning ahead
Sources: AARP 2024 survey and the March 2025 AARP data story; NAHB Remodeling Market Index, Q1 2025 special questions.
The survey runs every three years (2018, 2021, 2024); the next wave is due in 2027. AARP's own summary of the 2024 wave is that policy and communities "must catch up" to a preference that is already settled. Note what is missing from the public data: no national figure exists for the share of older adults who have already modified their home, which is why operators measure it themselves.
The housing stock reality
Older Americans own their homes at the highest rate of any age group, hold record equity, and live in a housing stock that was not built for them.
How accessible is the housing stock?
Share of homes or households with the feature. The three-feature figure is from the 2011 American Housing Survey, the last time it was measured comprehensively; the two-feature figures are 2019.
Source: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Housing America's Older Adults 2023.
Cost-burdened older households
Millions of households headed by someone 65+ spending 30 percent or more of income on housing. About half of them are severely burdened (50 percent or more).
Source: JCHS 2023, tabulations of American Community Survey data.
The equity is real. Homeowners aged 62 and over held a record $14.92 trillion of housing wealth in the first quarter of 2026, and the median 65-plus homeowner had $250,000 of home equity in 2022, up 47 percent from 2019. Aging in place is therefore mostly self-funded: paid from savings, income and home equity rather than by any third party (section 6).
The stock is old. The median owner-occupied home was 42 years old in 2024, up from 31 in 2005, and 47 percent of homes were built before 1980. Homes owned by people 75 and over have a median construction year of 1974. Regional design matters too: single-floor living ranges from 24 percent of older households in New England to 73 percent in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
The cost of care
Every dollar figure here is a published 2025 median from the CareScout Cost of Care Survey (the successor to the Genworth survey), fielded July through November 2025 across 387 metro areas.
National median monthly cost by setting, 2025
In-home care is priced at the survey's basis of 44 hours per week. Assisted living rose 5 percent in one year, from $5,900 to $6,200 a month.
Source: CareScout Cost of Care Survey 2025, national medians.
Home care by hours per week, against assisted living
Monthly cost of a non-medical caregiver at the $35 national median hourly rate. Above roughly 41 hours a week, in-home help costs more than the median assisted living community.
Source: CareScout 2025 national medians; hours arithmetic is the report's (hourly × hours × 52 ÷ 12).
Most and least expensive states for assisted living
Median monthly rate for a private one-bedroom. No District of Columbia figure is published.
Source: CareScout 2025 state tables.
Most and least expensive states for in-home care
Median hourly rate for a non-medical caregiver. The spread between the cheapest and most expensive states is more than two to one.
Source: CareScout 2025 state tables.
Who pays
Long-term care in America is financed by Medicaid, family savings and unpaid relatives, in that order. Medicare pays for post-acute episodes, not for daily help, and the private long-term care insurance market has shrunk to hybrids.
Who pays for long-term services and supports
Medicaid's shift from institutions to home and community
Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, 2025 vs 2026
Share of plans offering each benefit. The 2026 bid cycle trimmed the broad extras (meals, over-the-counter allowances) while in-home support and caregiver benefits grew inside special needs plans.
The workforce cliff
Home care runs on direct care workers: aides, personal care attendants and companions paid near the bottom of the wage scale. Demand for them is growing faster than for almost any occupation in the country, and supply is not.
Direct care job openings, 2024 to 2034
What the work pays
Family caregivers are the system
Sixty-three million Americans provide unpaid care, worth about a trillion dollars a year. The ratio of potential caregivers to the people who need them starts falling steeply this year.
Family caregivers, millions
Adults providing unpaid care to an adult or a child with special needs.
Source: AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the US 2025.
The caregiver support ratio
Adults aged 45 to 64 for every person 80 and over. The decline steepens from 2026 as boomers reach 80.
Source: AARP Public Policy Institute, The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap.
Unpaid care versus Medicaid, 2024
Billions of dollars. The value of unpaid family care now exceeds total Medicaid spending.
Source: AARP, Valuing the Invaluable 2026 Update.
The typical caregiver is a 51-year-old woman giving 27 hours a week for five and a half years; 24 percent give 40 hours or more. Nearly half report a major financial impact, with average out-of-pocket costs around $7,200 a year. Thirteen states now pay co-resident family members through structured family caregiving programs, the fastest-growing mechanism for expanding home care capacity without hiring. Loneliness sits underneath all of it: about one in four adults 65+ is socially isolated, and 33 percent of adults 50 to 80 reported lacking companionship in 2024.
Falls: the event that ends independence
Falls are the leading cause of injury death for people 65 and over, the most common reason a home stops working, and the risk that most home modification is designed to remove.
Fall death rates are rising in every older age group
Percent change in the unintentional fall death rate, 2003 to 2023, by age group and sex.
Source: NCHS Data Brief 532, June 2025.
What a fall year looks like, 2024
Millions of adults 65+ in each outcome. Falling once doubles the chance of falling again.
Source: CDC, Facts About Falls and About Older Adult Fall Prevention, updated September 4, 2026.
The medical bill for non-fatal falls was $80 billion in 2020, most of it paid by Medicare, up from about $50 billion in 2015. Nearly 319,000 older adults are hospitalized for hip fractures each year, and falls cause 83 percent of hip-fracture deaths. The age-adjusted fall death rate climbed 21 percent between 2018 and 2024, from 64.7 to 78.4 per 100,000. Grab bars, curbless showers, lighting and no-step entries are the industry's answer, and they are the most requested projects remodelers see (section 14).
Technology landscape
The money is moving toward passive monitoring, AI in the back office of care agencies, and payment models that reimburse technology-enabled care. The robots have raised billions and shipped very little.
Trends with a verified 2025 or 2026 example
Companies to watch
Verified milestones from press rooms, filings and trade press through September 2026. Sortable. Amounts are as disclosed; "not disclosed" means exactly that.
Policy and payer timeline, 2024 to 2026
What changed, when, and what it does to the economics of staying home.
Public money for home modification and in-home support
State rankings
Fifty states and the District of Columbia on the metrics that matter for aging in place: how old, how fast, what care costs, what homes are worth, and this report's own Opportunity Index.
Map: choose a metric
Hover or tab to any state. Five equal-count bands; the legend shows the live range of each band. Small jurisdictions have chips below the map. The Opportunity Index is defined under the table.
Top 10 by Opportunity Index
Where the demand, its growth, the case for staying home and the ability to pay for it line up.
Bottom 10 by Opportunity Index
Mostly small, lower-cost states where demand is real but thin. DC is scored without a cost-of-care component.
Fastest-growing 65+ populations, 2020 to 2025
Percent growth of the 65+ population. The national figure is 15.5 percent on a July-to-July basis.
Source: Census Vintage 2025 state estimates by age.
All 51 jurisdictions
Home modification economics
The work is small, repeatable and under-served: most remodelers do some of it, fewer than at any time since 2004 do, and requests keep rising.
What remodelers install
Share of remodelers doing aging-in-place work who reported each project, Q1 2025 versus Q1 2023.
Source: NAHB Remodeling Market Index special questions, May 2025 and May 2023.
Typical installed cost ranges
Payback: months of assisted living that a one-time modification budget equals
Budget divided by the $6,200 national median monthly assisted living rate. A $15,000 bathroom-and-entry package equals about ten weeks of assisted living; the comparison ignores the care itself, which modifications do not replace.
Source: report arithmetic on the CareScout 2025 national median.
Outlook, 2027 to 2030
What the evidence above implies, with a confidence level on each call.
What this means for operators
For a home modification business, a home care agency, or an investor looking at either.
Methodology and sources
How the numbers were assembled, where they disagree, and every document behind them.