In Western societies, the rapid population ageing has led to a drastically increasing demand for long-term care (LTC). In the Netherlands, LTC is not used equally by those with a lower socioeconomic status (SES) and certain socieconomic groups might be disadvantaged. Therefore, the first aim of the present dissertation was to investigate how SES-differences in LTC use have changed over the past decades in the Netherlands, and how these changes can be explained by both individual factors and characteristics of the LTC system. In addition, potential inequalities in LTC use raise the question to what extent they affect the wellbeing of older adults. LTC plays an important role in maintaining the wellbeing of individuals with health impairments, but also leads to an undesirable dependency on caregivers. Therefore, the second aim of this dissertation was to investigate the relationship between LTC use, the subjective evaluation of LTC and psychological wellbeing. The first study investigates how and why SES-inequalities in the use of LTC have changed over time. The findings indicate that they remained similar. However, the SES-gradient in informal care widened over time: Informal care use decreased steeply among higher, but not lower SES-groups. This exacerbation of SES-inequalities persisted even when we accounted for individual factors such as health and partner status. The second study investigates to what extent defamilization as a system-characteristic can explain SES-differences in LTC use in addition to individual factors. The findings indicate that de-familization had a limited direct impact on LTC use: It is associated with less use of privately-paid care, but does not impact informal care use beyond individual characteristics. Formal care, however, was used more by lower compared to higher SES-groups in a de-familized context, but was used less by them when de-familization is limited. Thus, lower levels of de-familization threaten the equitable access to formal care by lower SES-groups. The third study ...