Today is National Grandparents Day in the United States. It is not a folk tradition but a statute: 36 U.S. Code § 125 asks the President to proclaim every year the first Sunday in September after Labor Day as National Grandparents Day, and to call on Americans to observe it with appropriate ceremonies and activities. Labor Day fell on 7 September this year, so the day is 13 September 2026. Congress first created it in 1979.
It is a good day to talk about the one line that almost never appears in a relocation spreadsheet.
Every serious plan to move abroad has a model behind it. Income tax at home and abroad. Social security. Rent or purchase price. School fees. Health insurance. Flights for the first year. The spreadsheet gets longer the more carefully it is built, and it should. But there is a row that is missing from almost every version, because it is hard to price and uncomfortable to type: what the move costs the grandparents, and what their absence costs the family that leaves.
A Very Large Number of Families
This is not a niche problem. The United Nations Population Division estimates that there were 304 million international migrants in the world in 2024, according to its International Migrant Stock 2024. That figure has nearly doubled since 1990, when the estimate was 154 million.
Many of those people left parents behind, and many of those parents are grandparents now, or will be. For them, emigration is not a tax question. It is the difference between being part of a grandchild's week and being a face on a screen.
The Brief has written about the social cost of leaving from the point of view of the person who goes, in The Friends You Keep After You Leave. The grandparents are the other side of that ledger. They did not choose the move, they often cannot follow it, and they pay part of its price.
What Distance Does to Time
The simplest way to see the cost is to count.
Take a child who grows up in the same town as a grandparent who comes to lunch every Sunday. Over the first eighteen years of that child's life, that is roughly 936 Sundays. Some will be missed, but the order of magnitude is hundreds of shared afternoons: homework at the kitchen table, a walk, an argument about football, a story told for the fifth time.
Now move the family to another continent. Suppose the grandparents visit, or are visited, twice a year for ten days each. Over eighteen years that is 360 days. On paper, that looks like more time than 936 afternoons. In practice it is a different kind of time. It is compressed into holidays, surrounded by travel, jet lag and the pressure to make every day count. It is time as a guest, not time as part of ordinary life.
Neither pattern is wrong. But they are not the same thing, and the difference is one of the few costs of emigration that cannot be recovered later with money. A tax saving can be reinvested. A missed decade of Sunday afternoons cannot.
The Visa Wall
Many families assume that if the distance becomes too painful, the grandparents can simply come too. For families moving from outside a free-movement area, the rules usually say otherwise.
The United Kingdom offers a family visa for an adult who needs to be cared for by a relative who lives there permanently. According to GOV.UK, the applicant must prove that they need long-term care to do everyday personal and household tasks because of illness, disability or age, and that the care they need is not available or affordable in the country where they live. The relative in the UK must be able to accommodate and support them without public funds. The application fee from outside the UK is 3,635 pounds. It is a route for the frail parent who has no care at home, not for the healthy grandparent who would like to help with the school run.
Australia has a dedicated route for parents, the Contributory Parent visa. The Department of Home Affairs lists its cost as from 49,900 Australian dollars over two instalments for a single applicant, and warns that demand for parent visas is greater than the number of places available each year, which leads to long processing times.
Even visiting has limits. The Schengen rules allow a stay of up to 90 days in any 180-day period for short visits, according to the European Commission. Grandparents from outside the EU who want to spend a long winter with their grandchildren in Spain or Portugal run into that ceiling quickly, and visas for longer stays follow national procedures.
The point is not that these rules are unjust. Every country has to decide whom it admits and on what terms. The point is that a family's move is often irreversible for the older generation in a way the younger generation does not notice when they sign the lease. The Brief has argued that a real Plan B has to cover everyone in the family, not only the person with the passport, in The Two-Passport Family. Grandparents are part of "everyone", even when they are not part of the move.
The Care Question Arrives Later
There is a second cost, and it arrives on a delay.
The move is usually made when the parents in the middle generation are in their thirties or forties and the grandparents are in their sixties: healthy, independent, perhaps still working. Ten or fifteen years later, the arithmetic has changed. The grandparents are in their late seventies or eighties. Someone has to take them to appointments, sort out their paperwork, notice when something is wrong. If every child has moved abroad, that someone is often nobody, or a stranger, or a sibling who stayed and now carries the load alone.
This is exactly the kind of question the Brief's Ten Year Test is designed to surface: not what the decision looks like in year one, but what it looks like when everyone in the picture is ten years older. Applied to grandparents, the test asks three uncomfortable questions. Who in the family will be within a short flight when help is needed? Is there a sibling who will carry the care, and have you talked to them about it? And could your parents, if necessary, legally and financially join you where you are going?
None of these questions is a reason not to move. Some of them are reasons to choose one destination over another, or to time a move differently. The Brief's essay on who should not emigrate makes the broader case that for some people, staying is the right answer. For many more, obligations at home are a reason to plan the move better, not to abandon it.
What the Spreadsheet Should Say
If the cost is real, it belongs in the model. Here is what that looks like in practice.
A travel budget for two generations. Not one flight home at Christmas, but a realistic number of visits in both directions, including the years when the grandparents can no longer make the long journey and the family has to go to them. For a family spread across continents this can become a substantial recurring cost, and it is easy to leave out of the budget. It belongs next to the other recurring costs in What a Plan B Actually Costs Per Month.
Geography as a family decision. A destination with a direct flight and a two-hour time difference is a different family life from one with two connections and a ten-hour gap. Two countries with similar tax outcomes can be very different for grandparents.
A home that can host. A guest room is not a luxury if grandparents are expected to stay for weeks rather than days.
Work that can travel. A job or business that can be run for two weeks from the grandparents' kitchen table is worth more to a family than the salary line suggests.
The legal groundwork. Up-to-date powers of attorney, access to the grandparents' important documents, and knowledge of their doctors and advisers are far easier to arrange while everyone is well and in the same room.
Their eligibility, checked early. If there is any chance that parents will need to join you later, find out now what the destination requires of them. Some routes, like Australia's, involve long waits; others, like the UK's, apply only once care is genuinely needed. Neither can be arranged in a hurry.
A Day for the Other Side of the Ledger
National Grandparents Day was written into American law to honour the older generation. It is also a useful day for anyone planning an international life to look at the move from their parents' side of the table.
Emigration can be one of the best decisions a family makes. It can give children languages, perspective and opportunities they would never have had at home. It can protect a family's wealth and freedom. None of that is diminished by admitting that someone pays a price for it, and that the price is often paid by the people who stayed. A plan that counts every tax euro and ignores every Sunday afternoon is not a complete plan.
Put the grandparents in the spreadsheet. Then call them. It is, after all, their day.
Work with Sebastian
If you are planning a move and want the whole family, including the generation staying behind, to be part of the calculation, book a consultation.
