Carers Trust said figures gathered following a survey give an "incredibly worrying sense of the scale of this issue for the first time in a decade", adding that they "blow all previous figures out of the water".
Official figures from the last census in 2011 put the number of young carers in England aged between five and 17 at 166,000, although this has long been thought of as an underestimate.
Research published this week calculates there could be as many as 800,000 young carers of secondary school age.
The research, carried out by Nottingham University and BBC News, involved 925 children across England, aged 11 and 12 and 14 to 15.
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