<p>Parental care strategies have been extensively investigated in cooperatively breeding birds, yet neotropical species remain underrepresented in such studies. Furthermore, studies assessing the contribution of breeders and helpers to offspring care have largely focused on food provisioning. This might offer a partial view of individual care patterns if helpers cooperate in other ways, or if group members specialise on different care tasks. Here we investigated how much breeders and helpers contribute to food provisioning, nest vigilance, brooding and sanitation tasks, and examined possible benefits of helping in terms of compensatory or additive care in a neotropical cooperative breeder, the grayish baywing (<i>Agelaioides badius</i>). Additionally, we assessed if variation in individual effort can be explained by task specialisation between and within the social roles (i.e. breeders and helpers). Helpers contributed significantly less to brood care than breeders, though helping effort varied considerably across nests. Breeders did not vary their provisioning or vigilance effort with the level of help, but helping was only partially associated with increased total care. Broods attended by more active helpers were provisioned at higher rates than those of unassisted pairs, whereas helper presence had no effect on total vigilance effort. We found no evidence for task specialisation within or between social roles, except for some division of labour between breeders in nest vigilance and sanitation-related tasks. Our study highlights the importance of considering the different care tasks to better assess helping effort and improves the knowledge about (allo)parental investment strategies in cooperative neotropical birds.</p>