A workplace report · April 2026

Poor sleep quietly costs the US economy as much as $867 billion a year in revenue.

A rigorously audited, bottom-up analysis of reported revenue, employee counts, and peer-reviewed workforce sleep research finds annual productivity exposure between $428 billion and $867 billion across the US economy. Every large employer in the country is losing an economically meaningful share of output to absenteeism its leadership cannot see on any dashboard.

Before it's a number

Behind every lost dollar is a tired worker.

We measure dollars because dollars mobilize capital and policy. But sleep loss is first a public health problem. Insomnia is a clinical condition with well-documented links to depression, anxiety, and workplace injury. Sleep is not a lifestyle preference, it's a basic human need.

2.3×
People with self-reported insomnia are 2.3× more likely to develop depression than the general population. Zhang et al., 20221
Medium to large
Effect sizes linking poor sleep to increased risk of depression, replicated across methodologies and populations. Scott et al., 20212
13%
Of all workplace injuries are attributable to sleep problems. Attention, coordination, and decision-making all degrade when people are underslept. Uehli et al., meta-analysis, 20143

We count dollars because dollars move markets. We count them alongside the clinical evidence, not in place of it.

Deep dive

The Fortune 500, up close.

The US figures above rely on industry-weighted extrapolation from BLS workforce data. To make the number concrete, we ran the same math bottom-up on every Fortune 500 company using FY2024 financial disclosures. Together they employ 29.8M workers, about 18.8% of the US civilian workforce, and carry a matching 18.5% of the total Sleep Tax. What follows is the full dataset, company by company and state by state.

01

The United States at night

Where the Fortune 500's sleep tax is concentrated. Each point marks a state, sized by the combined estimated annual impact of Fortune 500 companies headquartered there and colored by the industry that contributes the largest share.

02

Every industry, a loss

A single-ring view of the Fortune 500 by industry. Arc angle reflects the estimated annual revenue impact. Hover any industry wedge to focus.

The Fortune 500
$76.6B to $155B
Combined annual revenue lost to poor employee sleep across the five hundred largest US companies. Hover any industry wedge to focus.
Employees
29,753,978
Revenue
$18.88T
By industry

Where the losses concentrate

Ranked by total estimated annual revenue impact across the Fortune 500. Labor-intensive industries carry a heavier absolute burden, though every sector studied shows measurable exposure.

Spotlight

Where the sleep tax hits hardest

Four sub-categories where the Sleep Tax concentrates most sharply. Switch between them to see the combined workforce and estimated annual revenue loss.

500 companies in the dataset
Combined annual impact: $76.6B to $155B
Every Fortune 500 company quietly loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year to employees' poor sleep. Almost none of them are measuring it.
For business leaders

See your company's Sleep Tax.

The Fortune 500 figures above are aggregated from public 10-K filings. Get the same analysis for your specific organization — a personalized PDF with your company's annual exposure, the ranges behind it, and what a CBT-I-informed sleep coaching program could change. Delivered to your inbox in minutes.

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Read the methodology.