Key takeaways:
- Food manufacturing averaged 4.0 hours of weekly overtime per production worker in 2025, above the 3.8-hour manufacturing average and up from 3.6 hours in both 2023 and 2024.
- Roughly three-quarters of manufacturing absence traces to illness and injury, so a strict attendance policy isn’t the solution.
- Food manufacturing reports injuries at 3.3 cases per 100 workers compared to 2.3 across private industry, with even greater variance across individual subsectors.
Production workers in food manufacturing averaged 4.0 hours of overtime a week in 2025, according to BLS figures published in March. That’s more than the 3.8-hour overall manufacturing average and ahead of most subsectors, including chemicals (3.1), fabricated metal (3.5), and plastics and rubber (3.6). Only transportation equipment worked longer (5.3).
Manufacturing overtime climbed overall, from 3.6 hours in both 2023 and 2024 to 3.8 in 2025, though it’s still below its 2018 peak of 4.6 hours.
Overtime is the high cost of absenceÂ
Production and nonsupervisory workers in food manufacturing earned an average of $24.70 an hour as of August 2026. Overtime pays time and a half, so every overtime hour has a premium of $12.35 above straight time. At 4.0 hours a week for 52 weeks, that premium costs roughly $2,570 per production worker per year.
There are usually three reasons a plant needs overtime: demand above plan, unfilled positions, and absences. While most facilities keep track of the first two, the third routinely gets taken over by general overtime, leaving it unmonitored and unmanaged.
Most of your absence is illness and injury
BLS tracks absence by industry, and manufacturing had a 2.9% absence rate in 2025. Illness and injury accounted for 2.2 of those percentage points. All other personal reasons accounted for 0.8. Nondurable goods, the category food and beverage falls under, came in at 3.0% overall with 2.1 points from illness and injury.
So about three-quarters of the absences in your schedule happened because someone was hurt or sick. While a stricter attendance policy would lower the 0.8, it won’t do much for the 2.2.
Food manufacturing recorded 3.3 injury and illness cases per 100 full-time workers in 2024, compared to 2.3 in private industry overall. Incidents that led to days away from work totaled 2.3 per 100 in food manufacturing, compared to 1.4 in private industry.
Within the manufacturing sector, seafood preparation reported 5.0 cases per 100, beet sugar was 6.8, and dairy was 4.2. Animal slaughtering and processing came in at 3.2 overall, but logged more job transfer and restriction cases (1.4) than days-away cases (0.7), which suggests repetitive strain over acute incidents.
What to do before you schedule more overtime
Your general ledger records one overtime number. Separating it by cause for a single quarter helps determine whether you’re paying a premium for growth, for open requisitions, or for absence, each of which calls for a different response.
You can narrow it further from there. In most plants, a small number of shifts and lines generate the majority of absences, usually the ones running nights, the ones with the heaviest manual handling, or the ones where the same people have been covering gaps for months. Ranking shifts by unplanned absence hours will get you to the two or three worth working on.
Be sure to view additional overtime as the expensive answer it is. Overtime raises both cost and fatigue, and fatigue can worsen an injury rate already at 43% above the private industry average. The plants that reduce absence tend to work on the things causing it, which the BLS data shows is mostly injuries and illnesses.
See the BLS injury and illness tables for your own subsector’s rate, and the Industry at a Glance page for food manufacturing for current hours and earnings.
