The FIFA World Cup is not just bringing late-night watch parties and office bracket trash talk this summer. It could also quietly bench a massive chunk of workplace output, with new research projecting roughly $17 billion in lost productivity worldwide and about $11.7 billion of that in the United States alone. For employers that live and die by frontline staffing and rigid shifts, that is less a fun trivia fact and more a five-week scheduling headache waiting to happen.
According to UKG, the estimate comes from an online survey of 8,000 workers across eight countries combined with national wage and hours-worked data. UKG says Censuswide ran the poll from May 8 to May 12, 2026, and that all modeling is expressed in U.S. dollars. The company blended how people say they plan to behave with what they actually earn and how much they work to arrive at the projected hit.
"What makes the World Cup so relevant is that it reflects a challenge that organizations face every day," UKG Chief Product Officer Suresh Vittal said in the company release, adding that employers should brace for fast-moving schedule changes long before the opening whistle.
How workers say they'll behave
Channel NewsAsia highlights the headline numbers from the survey: about 37% of employees say they plan to tweak their work schedules to catch matches, and 27% admit they may roll in late, duck out early or skip shifts altogether. That is not exactly the stuff scheduling managers dream of.
The polling also found that 14% of respondents expect to stream games while on the job, 22% anticipate being tired at work and 11% openly acknowledged they might show up hungover. Those percentages translate into very real operational risk for sectors that depend on alert, in-person staff, including retail, hospitality and health care.
The report notes that managers are actually more likely than non-managers to request days off or seek last-minute flexibility during the tournament. In plenty of workplaces, that means the people who write the schedule also want to bend it.
How UKG built the $17 billion estimate
UKG says its lost-productivity figure combines survey responses with national wage and hours-worked statistics to model both absenteeism and presenteeism costs in each country. In other words, it is counting not only the people who call out, but also the ones who show up exhausted and glued to a second screen.
The company breaks out country-level impacts, pegging Germany at about $1.34 billion and the United Kingdom around $912 million in potential productivity losses. Canada, France, Australia, Mexico and the Netherlands are expected to see smaller but still meaningful hits.
UKG presents the estimate less as a doom-and-gloom forecast and more as a practical warning for employers whose revenue depends on on-site labor and steady schedules. For those organizations, the World Cup looks a lot like a very popular, very disruptive pop-up event that lasts for more than five weeks and crosses multiple time zones.
What employers can do before kickoff
Industry coverage and HR experts say employers still have time to get ahead of the chaos with some basic planning, according to reporting in Human Resources Director. Top of the list are flexible scheduling, cross-training and clear, consistently enforced shift-swap policies.
Practical tactics include pre-approving swap requests for key match days, building small on-call pools and lining up temporary staff for likely peak windows so customer experience and safety do not suffer. Done right, those moves can turn the World Cup into a controlled stress test of scheduling systems instead of a costly blow to day-to-day operations.
The tournament kicks off on June 11 and runs through July 19, which gives employers a short runway to adjust rosters, set expectations and fine-tune internal communication. Local outlets including ABC10 and other national publications have already picked up UKG's analysis, underscoring that scheduling culture, not just soccer fandom, will help determine which businesses come through this summer's World Cup in good shape.
