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This introductory paper offers insights into the importance of care work for wellbeing, introducing key themes evident in this special issue that span the theoretical and empirical boundaries of care and paid work for wellbeing. The focus is predominately on caring for adults, whether dependent adult children, spouses, or elderly family members/friends.These key themes, which span both time and space, are as follows: scaled relations of care work for the production of wellbeing; roles, power and influence of intersectional identities on the wellbeing of carer-employees, and; employment interventions to support opportunities for care and wellbeing. In totality, these three themes point to a common question: how can care responsibilities be more equally shared? Addressing this question is complex since care work spans multiple scales, from family units through to country-specific collective norms, and across international policy. It also begs the question of how to best sustain the four primary groups of supports implicated in care work, including: unpaid carers, such as family, friends, and neighbours; community supports and services provided by non-profits and the voluntary sector; state/government supports, such as paid leaves or employment insurance for carers, and; employers of unpaid carers. The geographical scope of the papers contained in the special issue span from international country comparisons of unpaid care work, through to transnational experiences across two or more countries, through to case studies situated in two of Canada's largest provinces. Building on the three key themes, strategies are proposed to inform the development of sustainable care systems.