The Cost of Manufacturing Labor Shortages (2026)

The short version: The trillion-dollar estimates attached to the manufacturing labor shortage come from consulting studies that model forgone output. In their 2021 study, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute put the potential impact of 2.1 million unfilled jobs on the U.S. economy at more than $1 trillion in 2030 alone. Their 2024 study projects about 1.9 million unfilled jobs through 2033 and prints no dollar figure.

Government data reports job openings and plants citing labor constraints without estimating a national dollar cost of labor shortages. BLS counted 522,000 open manufacturing jobs in August 2026, up from 416,000 a year earlier. In the Census Bureau's second-quarter 2026 plant survey, 22.2% of manufacturing plants that gave a reason for operating below full capacity cited insufficient labor.

Other sources provide benchmarks for turnover and workplace injuries, although they do not isolate costs caused by labor shortages. A review of 30 case studies puts the median cost of replacing a worker at 21% of annual salary, excluding executives and physicians. In Travelers' manufacturing indemnity claims, 31% involved first-year employees.

Workforce concern remains below its earlier peaks but rose in NAM's third-quarter 2026 survey. Attracting and retaining a quality workforce was cited by 54.9% of respondents, fourth on the list, up from 46.9% and sixth place in the second quarter. NAM estimated an average of 4.79% of jobs unfilled among respondents.

How We Evaluated

Independent editorial analysis based on publicly available government data, peer-reviewed research, and the original pages behind widely quoted benchmarks.

Reliable Magazine does not sell scheduling software, staffing services, or consulting and has no commercial interest in routing readers toward any particular vendor. Reliable does not accept payment for rankings. Vendors may sponsor enhanced listings with additional detail, but editorial rankings are independent. Read our editorial policy.

We sorted every figure into three tiers and kept the tiers apart:

• Government sources: BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for openings, hires, and separations; the Census Bureau's Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization, read through Federal Reserve Board research notes; and BLS occupational wage data for one arithmetic example.

• Research and policy analysis: the Center for American Progress review of 30 turnover case studies drawn from 11 research papers.

• Consulting, association, and insurer material: Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute (the workforce affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers), Korn Ferry (an organizational consulting and executive search firm), NAM's quarterly survey of manufacturers, and Travelers (a workers' compensation insurer), with each stake stated at use.

Three rules applied throughout. Each figure stays tied to the population, study period, and method of its source. Nothing is summed across studies, and no projection is treated as a measurement. A figure appears only if a named source page prints it, and our own arithmetic is labeled as arithmetic.

Where the Trillion-Dollar Figures Come From

The economic-loss estimates below come from models of potential output or revenue forgone if positions stay empty. None is a measured cost at any plant, and their scopes differ.

2018: $454 billion in 2028

The 2018 Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute skills gap study estimated about 488,000 manufacturing jobs open at the time and projected that as many as 2.4 million jobs could go unfilled between 2018 and 2028. The Manufacturing Institute's November 14, 2018 release put $454 billion in manufacturing GDP at risk in 2028 and more than $2.5 trillion over the decade, and reported that five of ten open positions for skilled workers were unoccupied.

Deloitte's report page describes the same $454 billion as a potential risk to manufacturing value added in 2028. The figure is output the model assigns to the unfilled positions within the manufacturing sector in one year.

2021: $1 trillion in 2030

The 2021 study, released May 4, 2021, projected 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030. Its "Measuring the impacts" section applies a manufacturing economic multiplier, citing a NAM figure that every $1.00 spent in manufacturing adds another $2.74 to the economy, and describes a potential negative impact on the U.S. economy of more than $1 trillion by 2030 alone. The Manufacturing Institute's summary states that the cost of those missing jobs could total $1 trillion in 2030 alone.

The same summary reports that about 1.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the early months of the pandemic and that 77% of surveyed manufacturers expected ongoing difficulty attracting and retaining workers in 2021 and beyond.

Because of the multiplier, the $1 trillion is a wider-economy figure. It is not a manufacturing-sector loss, and it is not a plant expense.

2024: a headcount without a price tag

The 2024 study, "Taking charge," was released April 3, 2024. It projects about 3.8 million manufacturing positions to fill between 2024 and 2033. Figure 2 of the report breaks that into about 2.8 million retirement replacements, 760,000 jobs from industry growth, and 230,000 tied to federal legislation (the IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS and Science Act). Approximately 1.9 million of the positions could remain unfilled if manufacturers cannot close both the skills gap and the applicant gap.

The report describes an online survey of more than 200 U.S. manufacturers, interviews with more than 10 executives, and analysis by Deloitte's economics team of the potential impact of unfilled jobs on the economy. Neither the web report nor the report PDF prints a dollar figure for that impact.

The $1 trillion figure is a 2021 projection for 2030. The 2024 study presents a newer workforce projection through 2033 but does not publish a comparable dollar estimate. For the headcount projections and the BLS occupation data behind them, see our Manufacturing Maintenance Skills Gap Statistics guide.

Korn Ferry: $8.5 trillion across 20 economies

Korn Ferry's 2018 report, "Future of Work: The Global Talent Crunch," modeled labor supply and demand in 20 economies as a whole, with separate analyses of three sectors (financial and business services; technology, media, and telecommunications; and manufacturing) and the remainder of each economy. It projected a combined deficit of 85.2 million workers and $8.452 trillion in unrealized annual revenue by 2030 across the economies studied.

The manufacturing figures are a subset of that total. The report prints a global manufacturing deficit of 7.9 million workers and $607.14 billion in unrealized manufacturing output in 2030. For the United States as a whole, it prints a highly skilled worker deficit of more than 6.5 million and $1.748 trillion in unrealized revenue by 2030. The modeling was designed by Korn Ferry, Man Bites Dog, and Oxford Analytica and executed by Oxford Analytica.

Korn Ferry sells recruiting and talent consulting. The $8.5 trillion figure is an economy-wide total across 20 economies and should not be read as a manufacturing number or a U.S. number.

How the models differ

These models estimate economic output at risk under assumptions about labor supply, demand, and productivity. Their scopes differ. Deloitte's 2018 estimate concerns manufacturing value added. Its 2021 estimate includes wider economic effects through a manufacturing multiplier. Korn Ferry's total covers 20 whole economies.

Each is a statement about an economy. None is what a plant pays when a technician slot stays open for six months. A plant's costs show up in other places: overtime, turnover, training time, injuries among new hires, and orders turned away. The rest of this guide follows those.

What Government Data Counts

Job openings

JOLTS counts a position as open only if it exists, could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting from outside the establishment. BLS does not ask why a position is open or how long it has been open. The August 2026 release (USDL-26-1547, September 29, 2026) reports the following for manufacturing, seasonally adjusted.

Three things stand out:

• Manufacturing openings rose by 106,000 over the year (our arithmetic on the two BLS levels), and the increase sits in durable goods. Nondurable goods openings fell.

• The manufacturing openings rate of 4.0% sits close to the 4.3% rate for all nonfarm employers. Manufacturing is not an outlier on this measure.

• Hires exceeded separations in August 2026 by 21,000 (our arithmetic). BLS reported that quits increased in nondurable goods manufacturing by 28,000 that month.

For scale, BLS reported 7.1 million total job openings, 5.2 million hires, and 3.1 million quits across the economy in August 2026. In the January 2026 release, BLS put the 2025 annual average at 7.1 million openings, with 63.0 million hires and 38.0 million quits for the year. Quits were 60.6% of all separations in 2025.

An opening is a seat an employer is trying to fill. It is not evidence of a shortage by itself, and JOLTS attaches no cost to it.

Plants held below capacity for lack of labor

The Census Bureau's Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization asks about 7,500 manufacturing and publishing plants each quarter to report actual production and full production capability. Plants operating below full capability mark the reasons from a list that includes insufficient orders, insufficient supply of materials, and insufficient supply of labor.

This is the closest thing to a government measure of production constrained by labor. In the second-quarter 2026 workbook (Table 3b, all manufacturing), Census estimated that 22.2% of responding manufacturing plants that identified at least one reason for operating below full production capability cited insufficient supply of labor, with a standard error of 1.4 percentage points. Insufficient orders was cited by 67.1%. The third-quarter 2024 workbook put the labor share at 20.6%.

Three details govern how to read those percentages. Census weights the responses, and the denominator is the weighted number of plants that checked at least one reason, not every manufacturing plant. Plants could select more than one reason. And the gap between 20.6% and 22.2% is a difference between two point estimates with sampling error, not an established trend.

Federal Reserve Board economists tracked the same question in earlier years. Jessica Stahl and Norman Morin's 2013 note reports that about 20% of respondents cited insufficient supply of local labor force or skills in the late 1990s, nearly 15% in 2006, and 1.5% in 2009. A 2018 note reports that insufficient orders remained the most common reason by far, cited by more than 75% of respondents in the third quarter of 2017 (nearly 90% during the recession), with labor the second most common reason, back to roughly its pre-recession level.

The 2013 note weights responses by plant-level receipts, so the historical Fed figures and the current Census establishment percentages are not one identically calculated series. The historical estimates document labor constraints in earlier periods; their different weighting limits direct comparison with current Census percentages.

The survey counts plants, not lost units or dollars. A plant that checks the labor box may be short one shift or one skilled trade. The survey does not say how far below capacity labor alone pushed it.

What Manufacturers Report

The National Association of Manufacturers has run its Manufacturers' Outlook Survey every quarter since late 1997. NAM is a trade association that advocates for manufacturers. Its methodology page says the survey covers manufacturers of varying sizes, members and nonmembers, and its results combine opinions, expectations, and self-reported business conditions. The results describe the participating companies and should not be treated as a nationally representative vacancy count.

The workforce question has moved a long way:

• First quarter 2019 (466 survey responses): 71.3% named the inability to attract and retain a quality workforce among their biggest business challenges. In its March 5, 2019 release, NAM reported that more than one in four manufacturers surveyed had turned down new business opportunities because of workforce shortages.

• Third quarter 2023: 72.1% named it a top challenge, per the NAM summary.

• First quarter 2024: more than 65%, as cited in the 2024 Deloitte study.

• Second quarter 2026 (215 survey responses, May 12 to 28): 46.9% named workforce among their biggest challenges. That placed it sixth, behind increased raw material costs (83.1%), trade uncertainties (71.8%), rising healthcare and insurance costs (70.0%), transportation and logistics costs (61.0%), and supply chain challenges (50.2%).

• Third quarter 2026 (220 survey responses, August 11 to 27, released September 14): 54.9% named workforce among their biggest challenges. It moved up to fourth, behind increased raw material costs (80.8%), rising healthcare and insurance costs (72.3%), and trade uncertainties (62.4%), and ahead of transportation and logistics costs (52.1%) and supply chain challenges (44.6%).

NAM has also started asking what share of jobs remain unfilled. In the third quarter of 2026, 66.1% of respondents said less than 5%, 23.7% said 5% to 10%, 7.0% said 10% to 15%, and 3.3% said more than 15%. NAM estimates an average of 4.79% of jobs unfilled from those response ranges, up from 4.25% in the second quarter. The published reports do not provide a matched-company comparison.

Third-quarter respondents expected full-time employment to grow 1.8% and wages to grow 3.1% over the following 12 months, up from 1.0% and 2.9% in the second quarter. In the second-quarter survey, one in ten respondents (10.9%) said they had slowed hiring, left openings unfilled, or reduced their workforce in the past five years because of healthcare costs, a reminder that some open seats are a choice.

Respondents check every challenge that applies, so the percentages exceed 100%. The reported average share of unfilled jobs is estimated from response ranges, not from reported counts.

The Costs That Trace to Measured Data

The following sources describe turnover costs, overtime, and injuries. They do not isolate the additional costs caused by labor shortages. Their figures can inform a plant's own analysis; they do not measure the national price of the shortage.

Replacing a worker

A 2012 Center for American Progress review by Heather Boushey and Sarah Jane Glynn supplies the turnover benchmark used here. The authors pooled 30 case studies from 11 research papers published between 1992 and 2007.

Their findings:

• For all positions except executives and physicians (27 case studies), the typical, or median, cost of turnover was 21% of an employee's annual salary.

• For workers earning less than $50,000 a year, the typical cost was 20% of salary across 22 case studies.

• For positions earning less than $30,000, it was 16%.

• Across all 30 case studies the estimates ranged from 5.8% to 213% of salary, depending on the job and skill level.

The costs the studies counted include separation processing, recruiting and hiring, training, and the lost productivity while a position is vacant and while the replacement gets up to speed.

As an illustration, BLS reports a median annual wage of $64,100 (May 2025) for industrial machinery mechanics, machinery maintenance workers, and millwrights on its Occupational Outlook Handbook page. Twenty-one percent of that wage is $13,461. That is our arithmetic on a cross-industry median drawn from papers published between 1992 and 2007. It is a starting point for a plant's own calculation, and nothing more.

The Center for American Progress is a policy institute. Its pooled benchmark is cross-industry: the report's appendix lists case studies in grocery retail, hotels, hospitals, long-term care, schools, call centers, and a set of New Jersey employers that includes one heavy manufacturing plant.

Injuries among first-year workers

Travelers, a workers' compensation insurer, analyzed more than 1.2 million claims it received for accident years 2021 through 2025 for its 2026 Injury Impact Report, released May 4, 2026. The findings cover indemnity claims, meaning claims in which the injured employee could not immediately return to work. The report's methodology footnote excludes COVID-19 claims and zero-dollar claims.

Within its manufacturing claims, 31% involved first-year employees, and injured manufacturing workers missed an average of 76 workdays. Across the analyzed industries, first-year employees accounted for about 37% of claims and 34% of claim costs, generating more than 5 million missed workdays over the five years. The all-industry average was 80 missed workdays.

These claim shares do not establish comparative injury rates. The report gives no workforce or hours-worked denominator for first-year employees, and it does not identify what portion of the claims, if any, is attributable to labor shortages. For BLS injury and fatality data on maintenance occupations, see our Maintenance Worker Injury and Fatality Statistics guide.

Overtime to cover unfilled positions

Manufacturers may use overtime to cover unfilled positions. Unfilled jobs can also reduce production, as the Census plant survey shows. BLS reports that production and nonsupervisory employees in manufacturing averaged 3.8 overtime hours per week in 2025. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #23 states that covered, nonexempt employees must receive overtime pay of at least 1.5 times their regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek. BLS does not report how much overtime is worked to cover vacancies.

Our Real Cost of Maintenance Overtime guide covers the wage arithmetic, the injury research, and the 5% maintenance overtime benchmark.

Orders turned away

The only measures of lost business in these sources are counts of companies, not dollars. In its March 2019 release, NAM reported that more than one in four manufacturers surveyed had turned down new business opportunities because of workforce shortages. The Census plant survey counts plants constrained by labor. Neither source converts the lost work into revenue.

At a Glance

Honest Limitations

• The large economic-loss figures are model outputs. The Deloitte, Manufacturing Institute, and Korn Ferry figures estimate output or revenue that would be forgone. None was measured at a plant, and each depends on assumptions about growth, retirements, and productivity.

• The models differ in scope. The 2018 Deloitte figure is manufacturing value added. The 2021 figure applies a multiplier and describes the wider U.S. economy. Korn Ferry's total covers 20 whole economies. They cannot be compared with one another or summed.

• The $1 trillion figure is a dated projection. It is a 2021 projection for the year 2030. The 2024 study in the same series publishes a newer headcount projection through 2033 and no comparable dollar estimate.

• Government data counts seats and plants. JOLTS counts openings. The Census plant survey counts plants. Neither assigns a cost.

• The Census percentages have a narrow denominator. They are weighted shares of responding plants that gave at least one reason for operating below full capability, and plants could select several reasons. The move from 20.6% to 22.2% is a difference between two point estimates with sampling error.

• The Fed and Census series are not identical. The 2013 Federal Reserve note weights responses by plant receipts. The historical estimates document labor constraints in earlier periods; their different weighting limits direct comparison with current Census percentages.

• NAM's survey describes its respondents. It combines opinions, expectations, and self-reported conditions from members and nonmembers who chose to respond. The third-quarter 2026 survey had 220 responses, and respondents could check every challenge that applied. The published reports do not provide a matched-company comparison between quarters.

• The turnover, overtime, and injury sources do not isolate shortage costs. They describe turnover costs, overtime hours, and claim shares in general. None of them measures the increment caused by unfilled positions.

• The 21% turnover figure is dated and cross-industry. It pools case studies from papers published between 1992 and 2007 across many industries. The $13,461 example is our arithmetic on a BLS median wage and should not be read as a measured manufacturing cost.

• The Travelers figures are shares of one insurer's indemnity claims. They exclude COVID-19 and zero-dollar claims, they are not injury rates, and the report gives no first-year share of the workforce.

• No total is constructed. This guide does not combine vacancy, turnover, overtime, and injury figures into a single cost of the shortage.

Related Guides

• Manufacturing Maintenance Skills Gap Statistics

• The Real Cost of Maintenance Overtime

• Deferred Maintenance Backlog Statistics

• Maintenance Worker Injury and Fatality Statistics

• Industrial Downtime Cost Benchmarks

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job Openings and Labor Turnover, August 2026 (USDL-26-1547; Table A manufacturing rows; the January 2026 release with 2025 annual estimates, the Occupational Outlook Handbook page, and the overtime hours page are linked in the text).

• U.S. Census Bureau. Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization tables (2026 and 2024 quarterly workbooks, Table 3b, reasons for operating below full production capability; the methodology page is linked in the text).

• Federal Reserve Board. Some Characteristics of the Decline in Manufacturing Capacity Utilization (FEDS Notes, March 2018; the 2013 note by Stahl and Morin is linked in the text).

• U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. Fact Sheet #23: Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA (federal overtime rule).

• National Association of Manufacturers. Manufacturers' Outlook Survey, Third Quarter 2026 (full writeup with question-level responses; the second-quarter 2026 writeup, methodology page, first-quarter 2019 release, and third-quarter 2023 summary are linked in the text).

• The Manufacturing Institute. 2.1 Million Manufacturing Jobs Could Go Unfilled by 2030 (summary of the 2021 Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute study; the 2018 release and the 2024 report PDF are linked in the text).

• Deloitte Insights. Taking charge: Manufacturers support growth with active workforce strategies (2024 talent study; the 2018 and 2021 study pages are linked in the text).

• Korn Ferry. Future of Work: The Global Talent Crunch (2018 report; economy-wide totals on pages 4 and 7, manufacturing on pages 22 and 23, modeling partners on page 44).

• Center for American Progress. There Are Significant Business Costs to Replacing Employees (Boushey and Glynn, November 2012; the report PDF with the case study appendix is linked in the text).

• Travelers. Travelers Injury Impact Report Highlights Longer Recovery Times Amid Declining Injury Rates (May 4, 2026 release; indemnity claims, accident years 2021 to 2025; the interactive report with the manufacturing section is linked in the text).