Indonesia Is Aging Faster Than Its Systems Are Ready For

Indonesia's status as a country with an aging population is no longer a projection — it is now a reality. According to BPS's (2026) official statistics release based on the results of the 2025 Intercensal Population Survey (SUPAS), the share of the population aged 60 and above has reached 11.97% of a total of 284.67 million people. That figure has already crossed the 10% threshold that marks the onset of an aging population phase.

In the same release, BPS Chief Amalia Adininggar Widyasanti noted that the national dependency ratio stands at 45.05. In other words, every 100 people of productive age support roughly 45 people of non-productive age, a group that includes both children and older adults.

The aging process is also uneven across regions. BPS (2026) recorded that 16 of Indonesia's 38 provinces have already entered the aging population phase. Special Region of Yogyakarta has the highest proportion of older adults, at 17.83%, followed by East Java at 15.45% and Bali at 15.07%. By contrast, the provinces with the lowest proportions of older adults are all located in Papua, ranging from Central Papua at 6.71% to Papua at 7.96%.

That said, SUPAS 2025 is not the starting point of this demographic shift. Citing the Coordinating Ministry for Human Development and Culture (Kemenko PMK, 2025), Indonesia has, according to BPS data, actually been in an aging population phase since 2021. In fact, Indonesia's demographic transition is occurring faster than the global average, with the proportion of older adults set to double in just 24 years. Kemenko PMK also cites a projection estimating that the proportion of the elderly population will reach 19.9% by 2045.

This shift poses a challenge because the systems meant to support it have not developed at the same pace. Kemenko PMK (2025) recorded that Indonesia's life expectancy stands at 71.85 years, while healthy life expectancy is only 62.8 years. In other words, the average Indonesian spends roughly the last nine years of life in poor health — precisely the period when the need for daily assistance and care tends to rise.

The next question follows naturally: who supports those nine years?

SUPAS 2025 data offers a fairly clear answer. According to BPS's (2026) release, 48.56% of older adults in Indonesia receive money or goods primarily from family — whether a spouse, child, child-in-law, or other relative. A further 37.72% still rely on employment as their main source of income. Meanwhile, the share relying on formal instruments is far smaller: pensions account for 8.82%, social security and social assistance for 2.42%, other sources for 1.35%, and savings and investments for just 1.13%.

This composition shows that family remains the primary support system for older adults in Indonesia. Formal instruments designed to support old age, such as pensions and social security, serve as the main source of livelihood for only about 11% of older adults. Family, by contrast, supports roughly four times as many.

This is not without cause. Kemenko PMK (2025) recorded that 84.75% of older adults who are still working are employed in the informal sector, leaving them without adequate pension coverage. BPJS Kesehatan (national health insurance) coverage among older adults also stands at only around 70%. On the service side, just 11.01% of hospitals offered integrated geriatric care in 2024. The government aims to raise that figure to 20% by 2025 and 50% by 2029.

In other words, families are still filling a gap that the formal system has yet to fully cover.

The trouble is that the family members providing this support increasingly do not live under the same roof. According to the 2025 Statistics on the Elderly Population (BPS, 2025b), 5.03% of older Indonesians live alone, while 22.90% live only with a spouse. This means nearly three in ten older adults go through daily life without a younger household member present, even though they continue to receive financial support from family.

This shift has also changed the way care is delivered. Children who live in the same household can offer help spontaneously and situationally — taking a parent to the local clinic when they complain of dizziness, or spending more time with them when their emotional state declines. Children living away from home, on the other hand, more often provide support on a scheduled basis: sending money on the same date each month, calling at the same time each week, or arranging needs remotely. This form of support is easier to plan and monitor, but is limited in its ability to respond to needs that arise outside the schedule.

Technology has become the backbone of long-distance caregiving. Yet the data shows that technology's ability to bridge distance is not being enjoyed equally by both sides.

According to the 2024 Indonesia Telecommunications Statistics (BPS, 2025a), 72.78% of Indonesians aged five and above had accessed the internet at some point in 2024, up from 69.21% the previous year. This figure represents the population at large, while adult children of productive age — the group most likely to be caregiving from a distance — belong to a segment with relatively high internet penetration.

The situation among their parents looks different. Based on the 2025 Statistics on the Elderly Population (BPS, 2025b), which draws on March 2025 Susenas data, only 34.13% of older adults access the internet, up from 26.42% in 2024. Mobile phone use among older adults stood at 52.23%, while computer use remained as low as 1.63%.

Comparing the two groups in the same year reveals an even sharper gap. In 2024, national internet penetration reached 72.78%, while internet penetration among older adults was just 26.42% — a difference of 46.36 percentage points.

Digital channels long seen as capable of bridging distance are, in practice, asymmetric: children are almost entirely connected, while parents are only partially so. In fact, nearly half of Indonesia's older population does not even own a mobile phone.

This disparity is also reflected in the types of support available:

• Emotional channels rely on voice calls, video calls, and family messaging groups. These are the cheapest and most frequently used, but their effectiveness depends on an older adult's ability to operate a digital device.

• Financial channels run through bank transfers and digital wallets. These are the most reliable, since funds can still be received without requiring a high level of digital literacy from the recipient, as long as the money can be withdrawn in cash.

• Medical channels make use of teleconsultation services and home-care platforms. CarePro, for instance, offers booking for visiting nurses, live-in caregivers, and doctor house calls through an app. However, this channel depends on the availability of healthcare workers in the parent's location, so its reach follows the distribution of partner services across regions.

This dependence on local partners shows that long-distance caregiving relies not only on technology but also on the availability of services in the area where a parent lives. CarePro, for example, still concentrates its services in major cities, while the provinces with the highest proportions of older adults, according to BPS (2026), are the Special Region of Yogyakarta, East Java, and Bali.

This gap is widened further by recipients' digital readiness. According to the 2025 Statistics on the Elderly Population (BPS, 2025b), internet access among urban older adults reaches 42.52%, compared to just 23.18% in rural areas. This makes coordinating long-distance care more difficult, particularly when a parent lives in a region with both limited service options and low digital access.

Efforts to bridge this gap have begun to emerge from academia. The Faculty of Nursing at Universitas Airlangga developed the Android-based Caregiver Lansia (Elderly Caregiver) app, which includes long-term care guidance and self-assessment tools such as early detection for dementia, depression, fall risk, and nutritional status (Universitas Airlangga, 2021). Even so, the app is designed for a caregiver physically present with the older adult. This means adult children living away from home still need a family member or companion on-site in order to make full use of the service.

All of the data above describes how resources flow toward older adults. Attention to the people providing that support, however, remains very limited.

Thus far, official statistics have largely captured the condition of older adults as recipients of support — their income sources, health status, and access to services. What remains largely unseen is the experience of family members, particularly adult children living away from home, who carry out caregiving remotely while coordinating their parents' various needs.

Instruments for measuring caregiver burden already exist and have been tested in the Indonesian context. Larantukan and Yudiarso (2025) tested the Zarit Burden Interview on 305 caregivers in Indonesia using the Rasch Model and obtained a Cronbach's alpha of 0.93, indicating high reliability. The study also found item bias based on gender, age, length of caregiving, and the respondent's geographic location.

However, its application to long-distance caregivers specifically remains largely unexplored. That validation study was conducted on caregivers in general, with the majority of respondents — 57.37% — caring for parents. Distance was not included as a variable in the analysis at all. Several items in the instrument also imply physical presence, such as questions about how a respondent feels when near a sick family member.

Meanwhile, the experience of adult children coordinating care from another city presents different challenges altogether — such as being unable to verify a parent's condition directly, or having to make healthcare decisions from hundreds of kilometers away. To date, these dimensions remain largely unmapped in caregiver measurement in Indonesia.

Studies in Indonesia on long-distance family relationships have so far focused mostly on support flowing from parents to children.

Najmudin, Khotima, and Lubis (2023), for example, produced a literature review on the role of parents in sustaining the psychological well-being of children living away from home through long-distance communication. The review concluded that communication technology effectively maintains the parent-child relationship. In this framework, adult children living away from home are positioned as recipients of support.

Aging-related research in Indonesia, meanwhile, generally treats older adults as the primary unit of analysis — covering health conditions, income sources, and access to services. Official statistics follow a similar pattern. BPS publications record where older adults obtain money or goods, but do not yet capture the experience of the family members who provide that support.

As a result, the role of working-age children who support their parents from a distance remains a relatively rare focus of study. Yet they often carry out several roles at once — financial provider, healthcare coordinator, and source of emotional support for parents living hundreds of kilometers away. In population statistics, they are recorded simply as part of the productive-age population sustaining a dependency ratio of 45.05. Their experience as long-distance caregivers, however, remains largely invisible in both data and research.

The findings in this article show that Indonesia's support system for older adults still rests on the family, even as family structures themselves become increasingly dispersed geographically. This creates new challenges in elder care and opens up several policy directions worth considering.

Expanding integrated geriatric services to hometowns and regions of origin. Currently, only 11.01% of hospitals offer integrated geriatric services (Kemenko PMK, 2025). Meanwhile, the provinces with the highest proportions of older adults — the Special Region of Yogyakarta, East Java, and Bali — include areas outside major metropolitan centers. This points to a persistent gap in service distribution that could be addressed through incentives for building elder-care health facilities outside big cities. The 2029 target of 50% coverage would carry more weight if this growth also reached regions with high concentrations of older adults.

Social security schemes that reach older adults in the informal sector. As many as 84.75% of older adults who are still working are in the informal sector without adequate pension coverage (Kemenko PMK, 2025). Subsidies or social protection policies for this group could be made more accessible by leveraging the channels families already use, including the bank transfers and digital wallets that serve as the main means of support from adult children living away from home.

Support for caregivers, including those caring from a distance. Current aging-related programs largely position older adults as the primary beneficiaries. Yet family members coordinating care from another city also face challenges that have gone largely unaccounted for. One initial step would be to adapt instruments such as the Zarit Burden Interview for the long-distance caregiving context, so that the burden they experience can be mapped before designing more appropriate forms of support or intervention.

As the number of older adults grows and family members become increasingly dispersed, aging policy needs to consider not only care recipients, but also the family members sustaining that care from afar.

From a market perspective, the growing practice of long-distance elder care points to an emerging consumer segment whose needs remain only partially served. At present, adult children living away from home must still assemble their own care system for their parents from a patchwork of standalone services — a messaging app for communication, a digital wallet for sending money, and a separate health platform, all used independently of one another.

Fintech companies and digital wallets have room to develop recurring care transfer features that add context rather than simply processing transactions. An automatic transfer paired with a meaningful notification for the recipient — for instance, noting that the funds are earmarked for this week's doctor's visit — can turn a simple transfer into part of family communication. The value here lies not in adding technical features, but in strengthening the meaning behind the transaction itself.

Healthtech companies and elder-care platforms have an opportunity to reposition themselves by treating adult children living away from home as the primary buyers of their services, with the older adult as the end user. A dashboard for remotely monitoring a parent's condition, nurse visit reports sent automatically to the adult child, and a clear emergency escalation pathway could all serve as differentiators in the market. The main challenge remains distribution, since such services are still concentrated in major cities even as care needs continue to grow in regions of origin.

Telecom operators and device brands face a still-wide digital access gap. Mobile phone use among older adults stands at only 52.23%, while internet access is at 34.13% (BPS, 2025b). Data plans or "family connect" devices that simplify the video-calling process for older adults could reach nearly half of the elderly population currently unconnected through digital communication channels.

As the number of older adults grows and more families live geographically apart, the need for solutions that connect adult children living away from home with their parents will only continue to increase. Brands that can meet this need stand to build relevance in a market segment expected to grow substantially as Indonesia moves further into its aging-population era.

A dependency ratio of 45.05 is a clean, tidy number. It shows how many people of non-productive age are supported by every 100 people of productive age. But the figure does not capture how that support is actually carried out.

Long-distance elder care is no longer simply a matter of logistics. It involves coordinating healthcare, making decisions, sending financial support, and working to maintain emotional closeness across hundreds of kilometers. These roles are becoming increasingly important as Indonesia enters its aging-population era, yet they remain largely invisible in statistics, research, and policy.

As long as the formal system remains the primary support for only about 11% of older adults, family will continue to serve as the main safety net. At the same time, more and more adult children are taking on the role of long-distance caregiver.

As Indonesia grapples with the future of an aging society, attention needs to be paid not only to older adults as recipients of care, but also to those who, every day, ensure that care keeps going — even from hundreds of kilometers away.

References

Badan Pusat Statistik. (2023). Statistik penduduk lanjut usia 2023. Badan Pusat Statistik.

Badan Pusat Statistik. (2025a). Statistik telekomunikasi Indonesia 2024. Badan Pusat Statistik. https://www.bps.go.id/id/publication/2025/08/29/beaa2be400eda6ce6c636ef8/statistik-telekomunikasi-indonesia-2024.html (Accessed August 4, 2026)

Badan Pusat Statistik. (2025b). Statistik penduduk lanjut usia 2025. Badan Pusat Statistik. https://www.bps.go.id/id/publication/2025/12/12/868d335b088dcddc3ddee052/statistik-penduduk-lanjut-usia-2025.html (Accessed August 4, 2026)

Badan Pusat Statistik. (2026, May 5). SUPAS 2025: Angka kelahiran total (TFR) sebesar 2,13, angka kematian bayi (IMR) sebesar 14,12, dan persentase lansia mencapai 11,97% (Official Statistics News No. 2645). https://www.bps.go.id/id/pressrelease/2026/05/05/2645/supas-2025--angka-kelahiran-total--tfr--sebesar-2-13---angka-kematian-bayi--imr--sebesar-14-12--dan-persentase-lansia-mencapai-11-97-persen-.html (Accessed August 4, 2026)

CarePro. (2026). Jasa perawat home care 24 jam: Layanan perawat profesional di rumah. https://carepro.co.id/layanan/perawat-livein (Accessed August 4, 2026)

Kementerian Koordinator Bidang Pembangunan Manusia dan Kebudayaan. (2025, March 6). Kolaborasi lintas sektor untuk memperkuat mobilitas penduduk lanjut usia. https://www.kemenkopmk.go.id/kolaborasi-lintas-sektor-untuk-memperkuat-mobilitas-penduduk-lanjut-usia (Accessed August 4, 2026)

Larantukan, A. M. F., & Yudiarso, A. (2025). Validitas alat ukur Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI) menggunakan Model Rasch pada populasi Indonesia. Humanitas, 9(1), 18–40. https://doi.org/10.28932/humanitas.v9i1.11007

Najmudin, M. F., Khotima, N. A., & Lubis, R. F. (2023). Peran orang tua terhadap psikologis anak rantau melalui komunikasi jarak jauh. JKKP (Jurnal Kesejahteraan Keluarga dan Pendidikan), 10(1), 88–99. https://doi.org/10.21009/JKKP.101.08

Universitas Airlangga. (2021, August 20). Pengabdian masyarakat aplikasi Caregiver Lansia berbasis Android: Inovasi dalam membantu perawatan lansia di komunitas. UNAIR News. https://news.unair.ac.id/2021/08/20/pengabdian-masyarakat-aplikasi-caregiver-lansia-berbasis-android-inovasi-dalam-membantu-perawatan-lansia-di-komunitas/?lang=id (Accessed August 4, 2026)