Indiana has approximately 1 million unpaid family caregivers , contributing hundreds of millions of hours of care annually valued at billions of dollars in unpaid labor.1Most of those caregivers are women in their 50s, working full-time, doing 20+ hours of care weekly. The financial and career toll is real and structural — and Indiana is on the less-protective end of states for working caregivers.

Federal FMLA in Indiana

The Family and Medical Leave Act allows you to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year to care for a parent with a serious health condition, with job protection and continued health-insurance coverage.2 Three conditions must be met:

Indiana has a high concentration of small employers, especially in rural counties and the manufacturing sector. A meaningful share of the Indiana workforce works for employers under the 50-employee threshold and receives no federal FMLA protection at all.

What Indiana is missing

Eleven states plus DC now have state-mandated paid family leave programs that pay a portion of wages while you take time off to care for a family member. Indiana is not one of them.3 The states that do offer this in 2026:

Indiana residents who work remotely for employers headquartered in those states are sometimes eligible under the employer state's rules — worth checking with HR.

The CHOICE program — Indiana's most useful state benefit

While Indiana lags on paid leave, it offers one of the better state-funded home care programs in the Midwest. The CHOICE program (Community and Home Options to Institutional Care for the Elderly and Disabled) provides in-home aide hours, adult day services, respite, and home modifications to Indiana seniors aged 60+ who are at risk of nursing-home placement but don't qualify for Medicaid LTC.4

Why it matters: middle-income Indiana seniors who are too high-income for Medicaid LTC but too low-income to afford meaningful private-pay home care often fall through the cracks. CHOICE catches many of them. Application is through your local Area Agency on Aging.

Federal tax breaks available to Indiana caregivers

Indiana has no state caregiver tax credit. The federal options are modest but useful:

Claiming your parent as a dependent

You may be able to claim your parent as a qualifying relative if:

Claiming the parent unlocks the Credit for Other Dependents: a $500 nonrefundable credit. Plus, you can include your parent's medical expenses in your own itemized medical-expense deduction.5

Medical and dental expenses deduction

If you itemize on Schedule A, you can deduct medical expenses for yourself, your spouse, and your dependents (including a parent you claim) that exceed 7.5% of your AGI. This often becomes meaningful in years of high care expense.

Dependent care FSA

If your employer offers a Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, you may be able to use pre-tax dollars to pay for adult day care or in-home care that allows you to work. Limit: $5,000/year for most filers.

The sibling conversation

The most common Indiana caregiving pattern: one adult child lives in-state and handles in-person care; one or more siblings live elsewhere and contribute money (or don't). The resentment economy this creates is one of the most reliable family conflicts we see. A few moves that defuse it:

Conversations to have with your Indiana employer

If you anticipate or are in the middle of intensive caregiving, the conversations to have with HR or your manager:

  1. Does the company offer family-care leave beyond FMLA? Some Indiana employers, especially larger Indianapolis-based and national companies, have generous policies and don't advertise them.
  2. Can you take FMLA intermittently rather than in a single block? The DOL allows intermittent leave when medically necessary, but many employees don't realize this.
  3. Can you work remotely, or shift your schedule? Indiana employers post-2020 have far more flexibility than they used to.
  4. What does the company offer in terms of caregiver support benefits — care navigators, EAP access, backup care services? Some large Indiana employers now subsidize services like Cariloop, Wellthy, or Bright Horizons Back-up Care.

Working caregivers and Medicaid planning

If you're paid by your parent for caregiving services, the arrangement has Medicaid implications. Without a written personal-care agreement, payments to a family caregiver look like gifts — which triggers Indiana's 5-year look-back penalty. With a properly drafted agreement that establishes fair-market-value compensation, the payments are legitimate income and don't affect Medicaid eligibility. See the Indiana Medicaid guide for the full picture.