Do Smokers Cost Their Employers More Than Non-Smokers?

According to Valley Public Radio (VPR), employers are taking a harder look into what it's costing them to employ smokers as they try to cut out health care and low productivity costs.

Some employers are even flat-out refusing to hire people who say they smoke. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates a rough figure of $193 billion on the cost of smoking a year.

It turns out that smoking isn't just expensive for those who purchase cigarettes. Researchers from Ohio University recently published a study in the journal Tobacco Control, and are now saying they have a tighter focus on the number: $5,800 per smoker per year for employers.

The largest portion of this number does not in fact come from health care costs, but from the work lost due to the estimated five smoke breaks a day smoking employees take on the job, costing employers around $3,077 per smoker per year. 

"The smoking breaks added up to a lot more than we expected," Micah Berman, an incoming assistant professor of law and public policy at Ohio State University who led the study, said to VPR.

The researchers were also conservative in their estimates of smoke breaks taken per day, concluding on five 15-minute breaks during an eight-hour workday, three of which took place during sanctioned breaks. Therefore, the actual cost for employers could be much higher than the number they produced in the study.

In addition to frequents smoke breaks, smokers tend to have far more sick days, costing employers about $517 per smoker each year, and $462 a year for lower productivity while working due to withdrawal symptoms that kick in within 30 minutes after the last smoke.

Some hospitals such as the Cleveland Clinic have decided not to hire smokers at all, and a small number of states have passed anti-discrimination laws in favor of smokers, an act against an act that allows smokers to be charged more for their health care, according to National Public Radio (NPR).

"I'm not sure what impact that is going to have on people making decisions starting to smoke or quitting," Berman to VPR. "Most people start to smoke when they're minors...[it is] extremely difficult and usually takes a lot of attempts to be successful." 

The researchers also say that if a company has a smoker, they can save at least $296 per year in pension costs, though that is still far outweighed by the cost of hiring smokers.