Back-up care benefits at work go beyond kids, aging parents as more employers pay for pets

Pets are part of the caregiving process and employers are taking notice.

As companies expand benefits to cover a wide variety of employee caregiving needs, back-up care for pets is becoming a more popular work perk along with back-up care for children and aging parents.

Back-up care is short-term, often employer-subsidized support that is used when regular arrangements fall through. It's highly in need across the U.S., especially as more companies are mandating workers fully back to offices. A new report from the AARP Public Policy Institute finds that roughly 59 million Americans provided care for family, neighbors or friends in 2024, adding up to 49.5 billion hours of care and an estimated $1 trillion worth of work.

At the same time, a growing body of data shows why pet care also matters to the workplace. A survey of more than 1,000 full-time employees who own pets found that 75% have missed at least a day of work in the past year due to pet-care issues, according to pet health-care company Wagmo, with 26% saying they missed six days or more.

Caregiving company Wellthy, which offers back-up care across millions of employees and families nationally, and for clients including Best Buy, Merck and Harvard University, first added pets in 2024.

"Where we're seeing the biggest growth area of our business is definitely on the back-up care side," Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, CEO and co-founder of Wellthy, told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in the latest episode of the "CNBC Changemakers and Power Players" podcast. "Companies will cover the cost for an employee to find a babysitter or a center for kiddos ... but also for seniors and actually pets, too," she said.

Jurist-Rosner was named to the 2026 CNBC Changemakers List.

Wellthy expanded its pet back-up care offerings with "Pet Care Concierge," launched in summer 2025, which can help navigate pet insurance, source therapy animals, and find emergency boarding and local veterinarians. Around 50% of their clients offer the ability to use this service for their employees.

Back-up care provider Bright Horizons also offers pet-care services through its partnerships with Rover and Wag!, typically providing walkers, sitters, and overnight boarding. At companies where Wagmo is a benefit, employees are reimbursed for routine pet care like vaccines, grooming, bloodwork, and exams.

With the work-from-home flexibility of the Covid era — during which there was a surge in pet ownership — now over at many companies, there is more need among employees for day-to-day care and longer-term care with business travel.

"We are seeing smart companies say 'we're going to do a return to office push', and ask folks to come back into offices. And we're also going to support them with their key personal logistics," said Jurist-Rosner.

Pets fit within a broader national caregiving crisis

Pet care may not be the most acute need among many families caring for children with special needs and aging parents with health issues. It wasn't part of Wellthy's mission at the outset.

Jurist-Rosner was motivated to found Wellthy by her experience helping to care for her mother, who had multiple sclerosis. "It was nearly a 30-year journey of navigating care for her. And she was my world. She was my best friend," Jurist-Rosner said. "And so I stepped in gladly into the role of caregiver, but it was tremendously hard and stressful and overwhelming for me. ... it's incredibly challenging for almost all families. ... and it felt like this burning need to go solve this problem for people like, people similar to me," she recalled during the podcast.

There remain extreme shortages in child-care and senior-care staffing, as well as affordability challenges, Jurist-Rosner noted, with child-care "more expensive than rent in almost every market in the U.S. right now."

"We're seeing the problem get worse and persist," she said. "I say people don't want to quit their families so they quit their jobs."

The expanded availability of pet-care benefits does fit well within this broader mission of Wellthy to serve families in all of their needs, while reducing financial and emotional stress and improving productivity for employers.

"We do find that most families are already stretched financially trying to pay for care and asking them to pay for another service on top of it feels like a lot. We get to be more accessible to more families. And for employers, companies get to improve retention, productivity," Jurist-Rosner said. "They get to have valued employees who might otherwise leave or need to take a leave of absence to handle their caregiving needs. I think this caregiving is kind of the under-discussed workforce equity, workforce productivity, and frankly, labor participation issue of our time."

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