Executive Summary
Military spouse employment challenges have stubbornly resisted resolution; this first-of-its-kind longitudinal study identifies the significant predictors associated with sustained career success.
Produced jointly by Blue Star Families (BSF) and the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF), this research followed military spouses over three years (2022-2025) to understand how their employment shifted through the distinct stages of military and family life.
While prior research has captured high unemployment and underemployment rates at single points in time, this study followed the same spouses longitudinally, revealing how career interruptions accumulate and how certain factors protect against them. It finds that many spouses move cyclically between employment, career change, and time out of the workforce to meet family and service demands — patterns that repeat across the military life-course.
This analysis moves beyond descriptive statistics to identify what sustains career continuity over time. The data show that continuity depends less on demographics or branch of service and more on the nature of the work or job itself. Education, location flexibility, fair compensation, and access to mentorship stand out as the strongest factors associated with steady, full-time employment across time. In contrast, structural barriers such as childcare access, cultural expectations, and employer skepticism continue to constrain progress.
