Research
Mixed
Insufficient sleep (less than 6 hours) reduces workplace productivity by increasing absenteeism and presenteeism, resulting in approximately 6 lost working days per year compared to those sleeping 7-9 hours.
Prioritize 7-9 hours of sleep to maximize work productivity. Sleeping less than 6 hours costs you approximately 6 working days per year in lost time due to being sick or less effective at work.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
The empirical findings of this study suggest that workers who sleep less than six hours per day report on average about a 2.4 percentage point higher productivity loss due to absenteeism or presenteeism than workers sleeping between seven to nine hours per day... this means that a worker sleeping less than six hours loses around 6 working days due to absenteeism or presenteeism per year more than a worker sleeping seven to nine hours.
Why this rating
Based on large-scale employer-employee data (n=62,366) and regression analysis.
Source
Why sleep matters -- the economic costs of insufficient sleep: A cross-country comparative analysis
Marco Hafner et al. · RAND Corporation eBooks · 2016
DOI 10.7249/rr1791
Meta-analysisCited 616×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Sleeping less than six hours per night increases all-cause mortality risk by 13% compared to sleeping seven to nine hours, while sleeping six to seven hours increases risk by 7%.Good
- Insufficient sleep imposes substantial economic costs on OECD countries, estimated at up to $680 billion annually in lost GDP across five major economies.Moderate
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