The Economic Value of Social Work: Evidence across the Workforce Pipeline and Implications for Equity

Social workers are essential members of the U.S. health and social care systems, contributing to care delivery, education, and community well-being across sectors. However, the value of social work is often overlooked in dominant policy and economic frameworks, which limit investment in the workforce and mask its broader societal impact. To sustain and expand the profession in the current context of policy uncertainty and workforce constraints, social work must conceptualize and measure its contributions in ways that capture economic impact and social work’s role in advancing health equity as a core component of the social infrastructure.

With over 700,000 practitioners across the United States, social workers are at the intersection of systems that are critical to democratic participation. However, the distribution of the workforce, its economic impact, and its contributions across sectors remain under-examined. This roundtable brings together a multidisciplinary team of social workers, health economists, policy experts, and researchers to present findings from a research initiative examining social work’s contributions across the workforce pipeline, from entry into the profession and availability in communities to impact in educational settings and on the broader economy.

Studies presented highlight the breadth of social work’s contributions to well-being and the U.S. economy and illustrate the need for a strong social work workforce. Multi-method analyses of the workforce pipeline highlight disparities in MSW affordability, raising concerns about who can enter and sustain the profession. Analyses using the CDC Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) show that social worker density is higher in communities with greater need, with the largest gradient in the Race & Ethnicity domain of SVI (0.54 vs. 1.64 and 1.53; p < 0.001). In health care settings, time-driven activity-based costing identified substantial non-reimbursed activities essential to care coordination and equitable access. In education, fixed-effects models across 225 Massachusetts school districts (2007–2024) show that each additional social worker FTE is associated with a 0.047 percentage-point increase in graduation rates (95% CI: 0.033–0.061, p < 0.001). Finally, input-output modeling estimates that the average disposable income of social workers is $65,039, generating $84.8 billion in total economic output and supporting approximately 248,000 jobs.

Together, these findings position social work as a critical yet under-recognized component of the infrastructure that supports democratic participation, economic stability, and equitable access to services and opportunity. This roundtable will engage participants in a facilitated discussion focused on advancing how social work’s value is conceptualized, measured, and translated into policy and workforce investment.

Guiding questions include:

1. How can we measure and communicate social work’s economic and equity-focused contributions to inform policy and workforce decisions?

2. How can we better capture social work’s cross-sector and non-reimbursed impacts in current methods?

3. What should be included in a comprehensive, pipeline-oriented framework for evaluating social work’s impact?

4. How can we strengthen equitable access to and sustain the workforce?

Participants will be invited to reflect on how research findings can be leveraged to strengthen advocacy, inform policy, and ensure that social work remains accessible and positioned to serve the common good.