• Posted May 19, 2026

Losing A Parent Can Dent An Adult's Earning Power

Losing a parent in adulthood not only breaks your heart, but can put a sizable dent in your bank account, a new study says.

Adults’ earning power persistently declines following the death of a parent, researchers report in the May issue of the American Economic Review.

The mental turmoil of bereavement likely explains much of this financial loss, researchers said. 

“Losing a parent is one of the most personal and painful experiences many of us will go through,” said lead researcher Mathias Fjaellegaard Jensen, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

“What this study shows is that the effects of bereavement can reach into other parts of life for years afterwards, including people’s working lives, through mental health and family support,” Jensen said in a news release.

For the new study, researchers tracked more than 734,000 adults in Denmark, of whom 91% first lost a parent at age 19 or older. The administrative data on these people also included info about their earnings, employment and mental health.

Results showed that men’s earnings fell by 2% and women’s by 3% on average within five years of losing a parent.

These adults also had evidence of worse mental health after bereavement, including increased use of psychological support, prescriptions for mental health medications and prescriptions for opioids.

Women with young children had the largest effect, with earnings falling by almost 4%. This could be due to the loss of informal child care provided by grandparents, researchers said.

This sort of effect likely is more profound in countries without Denmark’s comprehensive welfare state, which includes healthcare, child care and income protections, they added.

“Our findings from Denmark should be read as a conservative estimate,” Jensen said. “In countries like the U.K. — where mental health waiting lists are long, formal childcare is expensive, and benefit levels relatively lower — the earnings and well-being effects of parental loss are likely to be significantly more severe."

Support for bereaved adults – including paid bereavement leave, psychological screening, better access to child care and grief support groups – could help blunt the financial hit caused by losing a parent, researchers said.

“Because this is something nearly everyone experiences, it matters not only for how we understand grief, but for how employers and policymakers think about support at moments of loss,” Jensen added.

More information

The American Psychological Association has more on grieving the loss of a parent.

SOURCES: University of Oxford, news release, April 29, 2026; American Economic Review, May 2026