A bipartisan bill that would create the first federal tax credit specifically for working family caregivers remains stalled in committee more than eighteen months after its reintroduction, according to the official record on Congress.gov. The Credit for Caring Act of 2025 (H.R. 2036 in the House, S. 925 in the Senate) was reintroduced on March 11, 2025 by Representatives Mike Carey, an Ohio Republican, and Linda Sanchez, a California Democrat, along with Senators Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, and Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, according to a press release from Sanchez's office. The bill text, filed with Congress, would allow an eligible caregiver a nonrefundable credit equal to 30 percent of qualified caregiving expenses that exceed $2,000 in a tax year, capped at $5,000, and would require the caregiver to have earned income above $7,500 for the year to qualify. Both chambers referred the measure to their tax-writing committees, Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate, where it has sat without a hearing or markup as of this reporting.
The bill's sponsors frame it around the scale of unpaid caregiving in the United States. Nearly 12 million Americans provide unpaid care for someone with Alzheimer's disease or another dementia, according to the Alzheimer's Association's 2025 Facts and Figures report, cited in a November 2025 release from the association. Family caregivers spend more than $7,200 a year, on average, on out-of-pocket caregiving costs, according to the same lawmakers' March 2025 announcement of the bill. Sanchez and Capito have each said publicly that they cared for parents who had Alzheimer's, framing their sponsorship in personal terms, though that testimony describes their own families and is not evidence about the bill's effects on caregivers generally.
The credit's structure includes limits beyond the income floor. According to a legislative summary of H.R. 2036 and S. 925, the credit phases out for higher earners, reduced by $100 for every $1,000 of modified adjusted gross income above $150,000 for a couple filing jointly, and the care recipient must be certified by a licensed health care practitioner as needing long-term care for at least 180 consecutive days. Because the credit is nonrefundable, it can only offset federal income tax actually owed; a caregiver with little or no tax liability would receive little or no benefit even if otherwise eligible.
Versions of this same bill, under the same name, have been introduced in at least four previous sessions of Congress since 2017 without becoming law, including in 2021 and again in 2024. That history does not predict what happens to the current bill, but it is the plain record of what has and has not moved through Congress so far.