Objective To explore the impact of health expenditure of the elderly who are 60 or more years old on the family. Methods Data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) was adopted. The household catastrophic health expenditure for the elderly who were 60 or more years old was calculated according to their health expenditures and household affordability. Factors that affected the catastrophic health expenditure were analyzed by the Logistic regression model. Results Among all families that at least one family member was 60 or more years old, 17.00% of them had paid for the catastrophic health expenditure. For factors that affected the catastrophic health expenditure, the number of family members (OR=0.765), socioeconomic status was wealthy (OR=0.576), and socioeconomic status was the wealthiest (OR=0.514) were protective factors, and age (OR=1.025), suffering from chronic diseases (OR=1.443), and hospitalization (OR=2.285) were risk factors. Conclusion The government should pay attention to the primary health care, increasing the medical security for the elderly, and improving the equity of income, so as to reduce the incidence of paying the catastrophic health expenditure.