The Real Cost of Absenteeism in Manufacturing (2026 Data)

By the editors at Reliable. Last updated October 17, 2026.

The short version: Full-time manufacturing workers had an absence rate of 2.9% in 2025, and the industry lost 1.6% of its usual working hours to illness, injury, child care, and other family obligations, according to BLS. Applied to an assumed 2,080-hour work year, that rate equals about 33 hours, or four eight-hour days, per worker.

At the manufacturing average wage of $32.50 an hour, those 33 hours are a wage equivalent of about $1,080 per worker. One lost day of a production worker's time is $205 in wages, and a maintenance technician's is $276. Covering that production day with overtime at time and one-half costs $308. Those figures are our arithmetic on BLS averages.

Illness and injury account for 2.2 of the 2.9 points. Manufacturing's absence rate sits below the 3.2% rate for all full-time workers and the 4.2% rate in the public sector.

SHRM's 2014 survey of 733 employers estimated that overtime covered 47% of absences and that supervisors spent 4.2 hours a week managing them. Eighty-one percent of workers in goods-producing industries have access to paid sick leave.

The $225.8 billion "cost of absenteeism" attributed to CDC comes from a 2003 study that combined absence with reduced performance at work; its abstract attributes 71% of the total to reduced performance. CDC's own 2016 study put excess absenteeism from obesity at $11.2 billion a year and from hypertension at $10.3 billion.

What BLS Counts as an Absence

The BLS absence table comes from the Current Population Survey, the monthly household survey behind the unemployment rate. It covers wage and salary workers who usually work 35 hours or more a week at their main job. An absence is recorded when such a worker put in fewer than 35 hours during the survey's reference week for one of five reasons: own illness, injury, or medical problem; child care problems; other family or personal obligations; civic or military duty; or maternity or paternity leave.

Vacation, personal days, holidays, and labor disputes do not count. Neither do absences by part-time workers or the self-employed.

BLS publishes two rates:

• The absence rate is the share of full-time workers who had an absence in the reference week.

• The lost worktime rate is hours absent as a percent of hours usually worked.

Both are split between "illness or injury" and "other reasons."

Two notes on the 2025 table. BLS collected no data for October 2025 because of the federal government shutdown, so the 2025 annual figures are 11-month averages that BLS says are not strictly comparable with other years. BLS also moved to the 2022 Census industry classification with January 2025 data, which affects the industry rows. The 2025 table was last modified February 20, 2026.

Where Manufacturing Sits

In 2025, 13.76 million full-time wage and salary workers were employed in manufacturing. Their absence rate was 2.9%, with 2.2 points from illness or injury and 0.8 from other reasons. The lost worktime rate was 1.6%, with 1.1 points from illness or injury and 0.4 from other reasons. Components may not sum to the total because of rounding.

Applied to 13.76 million workers, a 2.9% absence rate means roughly 399,000 full-time manufacturing workers missed some or all of a typical week. That is our arithmetic.

Source: BLS, Current Population Survey, Table 47, 2025 annual averages (11-month averages excluding October).

Manufacturing's absence rate sat below the private-sector average and well below the public sector. Durable and nondurable goods were close to each other. The occupation rows cut across industries: production workers and maintenance and repair workers, wherever they work, were absent more often than the manufacturing industry average, and maintenance and repair occupations had the higher lost worktime rate of the two, at 1.9%.

Five Years of Manufacturing Absence Rates

Source: BLS, Current Population Survey, Table 47, annual averages for 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. The 2025 figures are 11-month averages, and BLS changed the industry classification with 2025 data.

Manufacturing's absence rate peaked at 3.4% in 2022 and has settled near 2.9%, above the 2.5% recorded in 2019. The lost worktime rate followed the same path: 1.3% in 2019, 2.1% in 2022, 1.6% in 2025. Illness and injury drove the swing. That component went from 1.9% in 2019 to 2.6% in 2022 and back to 2.2% in 2025, while "other reasons" stayed at 0.7 or 0.8 points throughout.

What One Lost Day Costs on Paper

BLS does not publish a cost of absence. It does publish what employers pay per hour worked, which is the starting point for any plant's own calculation.

The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 reports the following for private manufacturing:

• All manufacturing workers: $48.62 total compensation per hour worked, of which $32.50 is wages and salaries and $3.64 is paid leave of all kinds (vacation, holidays, sick, and personal).

• Production occupations in manufacturing: $39.25 total compensation and $25.64 in wages.

• Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations in manufacturing: $51.94 total compensation and $34.53 in wages.

Three pieces of arithmetic follow, all ours:

• A 1.6% lost worktime rate applied to an assumed 2,080-hour work year is 33.3 hours per worker. At $32.50, that is a wage equivalent of $1,082; at $48.62, a compensation equivalent of $1,618. Neither is an observed payroll loss.

• One eight-hour day of a production worker's wages is $205. One day of a maintenance technician's wages is $276.

• SHRM's 2014 survey estimated that overtime covered 47% of absences (see below). Covering a production worker's eight-hour absence with a co-worker's overtime at time and one-half costs $308 in wages.

These figures count time only. They do not include replacement workers, idle equipment, lost output, the injury research on long hours, or the supervisor hours spent reshuffling a shift. Our Real Cost of Maintenance Overtime guide covers the overtime side.

Whether an absent hour costs the employer anything on payroll depends on whether the hours are paid, through sick leave, consolidated paid time off, or salary continuation. The BLS Employee Benefits in the United States release for March 2026 reports that 81% of private industry workers had access to paid sick leave. Access was 81% in goods-producing industries, 77% for production occupations, and 82% for installation, maintenance, and repair occupations. It was 88% for full-time workers and 59% for part-time workers, 88% for union workers and 80% for nonunion workers, and 74% at establishments with fewer than 100 workers against 91% at those with 500 or more. The release table does not break out manufacturing as its own industry row.

Calculate Your Plant's Cost of Absence

The national figures above are reference points. A plant's own cost comes from inputs it already tracks or can start tracking this quarter. Where one of the sources reviewed here publishes a related figure, it is noted beside the step; none of them substitutes for the plant's own number.

Step 1: Lost hours. Multiply scheduled hours by the plant's unplanned-absence rate, which is hours absent for unplanned reasons divided by hours scheduled. The BLS lost worktime rate of 1.6% for manufacturing is the only related figure among the sources reviewed here, and it measures something different: it counts full-time workers who fell below 35 hours in a week for specified reasons, some of them plannable, so a worker who misses four hours of a 40-hour week does not register. Treat it as a reference point, and use the plant's own ratio.

Lost hours = scheduled hours × unplanned-absence rate

Step 2: Wages paid for hours not worked (descriptive). Multiply lost hours by the average hourly wage of the absent workers and by the share of absent hours that were paid, taken from payroll. BLS access figures (77% of production workers have access to paid sick leave) do not give that share: access means the benefit is available, and payment can also come through consolidated paid time off or salary continuation. This line describes what the payroll bought no output for. Under normal attendance the plant would have paid these wages anyway, so it is reported on its own and not added to Step 3.

Wages paid for absent hours = lost hours × hourly wage × share of absent hours paid

Step 3: Payroll change against normal attendance. Add the full wages paid to cover the absence (overtime hours at the overtime rate, temporary workers at the agency rate) and subtract the wages avoided on unpaid absent hours. With equal wages and full overtime coverage, this equals the paid absent wages plus the overtime premium. SHRM's 2014 survey estimated that overtime covered 47% of absences; the figure was modeled from a frequency-of-use scale, and it says nothing about how the rest were handled.

Payroll change = (overtime hours × overtime rate) + (temporary worker hours × agency rate) minus (unpaid absent hours × hourly wage)

Step 4: Lost output. Uncovered employee-hours are not the same as lost production hours. Five absent workers on a line that stops for a shift are 40 missing employee-hours and eight hours of lost output, and an absence elsewhere may slow throughput, delay other work, or cost nothing immediate. Measure the units or bottleneck downtime that trace to the absence, net of what the plant recovered later, and value the unrecovered output as the revenue it would have earned minus the nonpayroll costs the plant avoided by not producing it (materials, energy, and the like). Payroll costs and payroll savings already sit in Step 3, so they stay out of this line. For hours that were covered, SHRM's respondents estimated replacement workers at 36.6% less productive during an unplanned absence and co-workers at 29.5% less productive while covering. Those are respondent estimates from one survey, so the plant's own measurements are the figures to use.

Lost output = unrecovered lost units × (revenue per unit minus avoided nonpayroll cost per unit)

Step 5: Supervisor time. Multiply the hours supervisors spend finding coverage and rearranging work by their hourly cost. SHRM's respondents reported an average of 4.2 hours a week per supervisor, which SHRM extends to about 210 hours on a 50-week year.

Supervisor cost = supervisors × hours per week × weeks × supervisor hourly cost

A constructed scenario shows the mechanics. Assume a plant with 200 full-time hourly workers scheduled 2,080 hours each, or 416,000 hours a year; an unplanned-absence rate of 1.6%, set equal to the BLS manufacturing lost worktime rate for illustration; a $25.64 wage; 80% of absent hours paid; and overtime at time and one-half covering 47% of lost hours, with the rest uncovered. The paid share and the coverage split are illustrative choices with no empirical basis of their own.

• Lost hours: 416,000 × 1.6% = 6,656 hours, which would have cost $170,660 in wages under normal attendance

• Wages paid for absent hours: 6,656 × $25.64 × 0.80 = $136,528

• Overtime wages for coverage: 6,656 × 0.47 × $38.46 = $120,315

• Wages avoided on unpaid absent hours: 6,656 × 0.20 × $25.64 = $34,132

• Payroll change against normal attendance: $120,315 minus $34,132 = $86,183, or about $431 per worker

• Uncovered hours: 6,656 × 0.53 = 3,528 hours, whose effect on output has to be measured, not assumed, and valued as lost revenue minus avoided nonpayroll costs

Gross wage spending tied to the absences in this scenario is $256,843 (absent wages plus overtime wages). The payroll increase over normal attendance is $86,183. The two figures answer different questions, and neither includes lost output or supervisor time. Every input is an assumption chosen to show the method.

Where the $225.8 Billion CDC Figure Comes From

The most repeated absenteeism statistic in circulation reads: "productivity losses linked to absenteeism cost employers $225.8 billion annually in the United States, or $1,685 per employee." It is usually credited to CDC.

The sentence appears in a CDC Foundation press release dated January 28, 2015, announcing a business resource called Business Pulse: Healthy Workforce. The release attributes the figure to CDC and cites no study. The CDC Foundation is an independent nonprofit established by Congress to raise funds for CDC's work. It is not CDC.

The number itself comes from a December 2003 paper in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine by Walter Stewart and colleagues, "Lost Productive Work Time Costs From Health Conditions in the United States: Results From the American Productivity Audit." The American Productivity Audit was a telephone survey of 28,902 U.S. workers conducted between August 1, 2001, and July 31, 2002. The paper states that data collection and publication were supported in whole by AdvancePCS, a pharmacy benefit manager, and three of the four authors worked at its Center for Work and Health.

What the paper measured matters more than who paid for it:

• It estimated health-related lost productive time, defined as hours absent for personal or family health reasons plus the hour-equivalent of reduced performance on days at work.

• The total came to $225.8 billion per year, or $1,685 per employee, in 2002 dollars.

• The abstract attributes 71% of that total to reduced performance while at work.

• In hours, workers lost an average of about two hours of productive time per week: 1.32 hours from reduced performance, 0.54 hours absent for their own health, and 0.12 hours absent for a family member's health. The paper gives no separate dollar amounts for the three components, and the hour and dollar shares can differ because wages differ.

• In any two-week period, 10% of workers had been absent for a personal health reason and 2% for a family health reason.

The point that matters for a cost-of-absenteeism claim is that the $225.8 billion combines absence with reduced performance at work, and the paper's own summary assigns most of it to reduced performance.

The paper also excludes disability absences of a week or more and the cost of hiring and training replacements. Its Table 5 reports that installation, maintenance, and repair occupations accounted for $12.4 billion of the total and production occupations for $15.3 billion, and that maintenance and repair workers reported more than 70% more lost productive time per week than the occupation group with the least. Those are occupation figures across all industries, measured in 2002 dollars, and they include the reduced-performance component.

The CDC Foundation's sentence has since been repeated on HR, benefits, and software vendor pages as a cost of absenteeism, generally credited to CDC and without the 2003 paper behind it.

What CDC's Own Absenteeism Study Found

CDC has published its own absenteeism cost estimates. In October 2016, CDC researchers and an Emory University co-author published "Absenteeism and Employer Costs Associated With Chronic Diseases and Health Risk Factors in the US Workforce" in Preventing Chronic Disease, CDC's peer-reviewed journal.

The study drew on two data sets covering 2008 through 2011: the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (24,006 workers) and the MarketScan health risk assessment subsample (229,615 privately insured employees). Absenteeism was the number of workdays missed because of illness or injury. The findings:

• The average worker missed 2.2 days a year in MarketScan and 2.8 days in MEPS. More than half of workers in both data sets reported no sick days at all.

• Each of five conditions was associated with about 0.6 to 1.1 additional missed days per year in the MEPS estimates, after adjusting for age, sex, industry, and other factors: current smoking (0.58 extra days), physical inactivity (0.63), obesity (1.02), diabetes (1.03), and hypertension (1.13). The paper's abstract summarizes the range across both data sets as 1 to 2 days.

• Valued at $33.00 per hour of employer compensation cost for an eight-hour day, in 2015 dollars, the national excess absenteeism cost was $11.2 billion for obesity, $10.3 billion for hypertension, $9.1 billion for physical inactivity, $3.6 billion for smoking, and $2.2 billion for diabetes.

• Per affected employee, the excess cost ran from $153 a year for a smoker to $298 for a worker with hypertension.

• For a hypothetical 1,000-employee employer, using the MarketScan prevalence and absenteeism estimates, annual excess absenteeism cost ranged from about $17,000 for diabetes to about $286,000 for physical inactivity.

The authors note the costs could land on employers through lower productivity or on employees through lower wages, and the data do not say which. Their regressions controlled for industry, including durable and nondurable manufacturing, and the paper reports no manufacturing-specific results. The study's regression-adjusted predictions rise with the number of conditions: 8.6 missed days a year for MarketScan employees with four or five of the conditions against 2.0 days for those with none or one. These are associations, and the paper does not claim causation.

The Other Benchmarks People Quote

20.9% to 22.1% of payroll

SHRM's "Total Financial Impact of Employee Absences" survey, fielded April 10 to May 30, 2014, collected 733 responses from SHRM members and from customers and prospects of Kronos, the workforce management software vendor that commissioned it. Twelve percent of the 673 respondents who reported an industry were manufacturers. SHRM is a membership association for HR professionals.

The survey modeled its costs from the paid days offered to full-time employees in 2013, which is a different base from leave actually recorded. On that base, the direct cost of paid time off was 15.4% of payroll: 8.1% for the paid days themselves, 5.7% for overtime used to cover absences, and 1.6% for replacement workers. Adding productivity loss by replacement workers, co-workers, and supervisors brought the total to between 20.9% and 22.1% of payroll.

Three details are often dropped when the figure is repeated. First, "paid time off" in this survey includes vacation and personal leave, sick leave, consolidated paid time off, and other paid leave such as bereavement and civic time; paid sick time alone was 3.2% of payroll. Second, the overtime calculation assumes the covering employee worked a full extra day for every absence covered. Third, the productivity-loss percentages are respondents' estimates, and the replacement-worker question went only to respondents who said absences had a moderate or large effect on their organization: replacement workers were judged 36.6% less productive during an unplanned absence and 22.6% less productive during a planned one, while co-workers were judged 29.5% and supervisors 15.7% less productive, reported as the share of a typical absence day spent providing coverage.

Several findings in the survey travel well to a plant floor. SHRM's modeled estimate is that overtime covered 47% of absences, derived from a frequency-of-use scale with 368 responses. Supervisors spent an average of 4.2 hours a week dealing with absences, based on 345 responses in the zero-to-ten-hour range, which SHRM extends to about 210 hours on a 50-week year. Among the effects of unplanned absences, 69% of respondents named added workload, 61% added stress, 59% disrupted work for others, 48% lower morale, and 29% mandatory overtime. And 72% said they noticed more unplanned absences on Mondays, Fridays, and the days before holidays and major events.

$3,600 per hourly worker

The figure most often quoted for the cost of unscheduled absence, $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year, comes from a Circadian white paper, "Absenteeism: The Bottom-Line Killer." Circadian sells shift-schedule design and fatigue-risk consulting to extended-hours operations.

The white paper is a 16-page PDF behind a registration form, copyrighted 2005, and it carries the $3,600 and $2,650 figures. The landing page states that almost one in ten workers is absent when they should be at work and that the paper identifies direct and indirect costs. Its full methodology was not reviewed for this guide, so how the two figures were built, and from what sample, is not established here. The pages that repeat the $3,600 figure also cite the paper for a typical unscheduled absence rate of 5% to 10% in hourly workplaces. That rate and the BLS absence rate have no common published definition, so this guide does not compare them.

$575 billion and 1.5 billion days

The Integrated Benefits Institute, a nonprofit health and productivity research organization, announced in December 2020 that illness-related lost productivity cost U.S. employers $575 billion in 2019, equal to $0.61 for every dollar of the roughly $950 billion they spent on health benefits. IBI put the lost time at almost 1.5 billion days a year.

The estimate comes from IBI's proprietary Full Cost Estimator, which the release describes as covering absence, disability, presenteeism, and opportunity costs, and it is not reproducible from the release. Like the Stewart study, it combines absence with reduced performance at work, so it is not a cost of absenteeism alone.

How Absenteeism Connects to Shortages, Turnover, and Overtime

This guide is the fourth in a series on the workforce costs manufacturers can trace. The other three show the same pattern: government data measures how much, and the dollar figures come from consulting, vendor, and research sources with their own definitions.

• Our Cost of Manufacturing Labor Shortages guide traces the $1 trillion and $8.5 trillion shortage figures and sets them against BLS job openings and NAM survey data. When seats are empty, every absence lands on a thinner crew.

• Our Manufacturing Employee Turnover Costs guide traces the turnover benchmarks and reports BLS quits and tenure. SHRM's respondents named lower morale and added stress as effects of unplanned absence; neither that survey nor the turnover sources measure how much of that becomes a quit.

• Our Real Cost of Maintenance Overtime guide covers the 50% federal premium, BLS overtime hours, and the injury research. SHRM's survey estimated that overtime covered 47% of absences. Repeated overtime coverage extends work schedules, and the linked guide reviews the research associating overtime and long hours with injury risk.

At a Glance

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.

Government figures from BLS and CDC are kept separate from research (the 2003 American Productivity Audit paper) and from vendor, association, and nonprofit material (SHRM and Kronos, Circadian, and the Integrated Benefits Institute), whose stakes are stated where used. Each figure stays tied to the population, year, and definition of its source. Nothing is summed across sources, a figure appears only if a named source page prints it, and our own arithmetic is labeled as arithmetic.

Honest Limitations

• The BLS absence rate is a snapshot, not a days-per-year count. It records whether a full-time worker fell below 35 hours in one reference week for specified reasons, some of them plannable, and it excludes vacation, holidays, and part-time workers. A plant's unplanned-absence-hours ratio is a different measure. The 2025 figures are 11-month averages, and the industry classification changed with 2025 data.

• The sources reviewed here publish no current, all-cause cost of absenteeism for manufacturing. The dollar figures are national, condition-specific, or our arithmetic on averages, and the per-worker wage figures are equivalents under an assumed 2,080-hour schedule, not observed payroll losses.

• The $225.8 billion figure is in 2002 dollars, and its abstract attributes 71% of it to reduced performance at work. The paper gives no separate dollar amounts for all three components. The study was funded by a pharmacy benefit manager and relies on self-reported performance over a two-week recall.

• CDC's 2016 estimates cover five conditions, not all absence. They use 2008 to 2011 data and 2015 dollars, and the per-condition figures cannot be summed because many workers have more than one condition.

• The SHRM and IBI figures are not measurements of absenteeism alone, and the Circadian method was not reviewed. SHRM's percentages are modeled from paid days offered, including vacation, and its productivity figures are respondent estimates. IBI's estimate comes from a proprietary model and includes presenteeism. Circadian's subject is unscheduled absence; its 2005 white paper is gated, and its full methodology was not reviewed, so the sample and calculation behind its figures are not established here.

• The worked scenario is constructed. Its headcount, schedule, paid share, and coverage split are assumptions chosen to show the method, and this guide constructs no national total.

Related Guides

• The Cost of Manufacturing Labor Shortages (2026)

• Manufacturing Employee Turnover Costs

• The Real Cost of Maintenance Overtime (2026)

• Maintenance Worker Injury and Fatality Statistics

• Manufacturing Maintenance Skills Gap Statistics

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Table 47. Absences from work of employed full-time wage and salary workers by occupation and industry (Current Population Survey annual averages, 2025; the 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024 tables, the June 2026 Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Table 4, and the March 2026 Employee Benefits Table 6 are linked in the text).

• CDC Foundation. Worker Illness and Injury Costs U.S. Employers $225.8 Billion Annually (press release, January 28, 2015; attributes the figure to CDC without citing a study).

• Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Lost Productive Work Time Costs From Health Conditions in the United States: Results From the American Productivity Audit (Stewart, Ricci, Chee, and Morganstein, December 2003, volume 45, pages 1234 to 1246; copy hosted by the National Partnership for Women & Families).

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Absenteeism and Employer Costs Associated With Chronic Diseases and Health Risk Factors in the US Workforce (Asay, Roy, Lang, Payne, and Howard, Preventing Chronic Disease, October 2016).

• Society for Human Resource Management. Executive Summary: Total Financial Impact of Employee Absences in the U.S. (August 2014; survey commissioned by Kronos, 733 respondents).

• Circadian. White Paper: Absenteeism, the Bottom-Line Killer (2005; gated 16-page PDF; full methodology not reviewed).

• Integrated Benefits Institute. Poor Health Costs US Employers $575 Billion and 1.5 Billion Days of Lost Productivity (press release, December 8, 2020).