Could GTA VI Sick Leave Really Cost the US Economy Over $1 Billion?

Millions are rearranging their work days for one video game.

November 19 sounds like pretty much any other day. But on November 19, something unusual might happen to America’s workforce. Offices could be emptier, sick days could mysteriously multiply, and some employees working from home might find themselves considerably more interested in stealing virtual cars than answering emails.

There’s a new bug going around. The GTA bug.

We’re talking, of course, about Grand Theft Auto VI, a video game so anticipated that some estimates suggest 1.5 million Americans could skip work to play it, potentially costing the US economy $1 billion in a single day.

The GTA flu is coming

It sounds ridiculous. But after 13 years of waiting for a new mainline Grand Theft Auto game, fans are making vacation plans around its release.

For anyone who hasn’t played Grand Theft Auto, the premise is straightforward: imagine being dropped into an enormous, detailed version of an American city and given permission to cause almost unlimited chaos. You can steal cars, pull off elaborate heists, flee the police, or simply drive around listening to the radio. The games are part crime drama, part satire of American culture, and part digital playground.

The upcoming GTA VI takes players back to Vice City, Rockstar’s fictional version of Miami, and the surrounding state of Leonida, inspired by Florida. The story follows two criminals, Jason and Lucia, caught up in a conspiracy.

It’s difficult to overstate the anticipation. The previous installment, GTA V, came out in September 2013, when the PlayStation 4 hadn’t even launched. According to publisher Take-Two Interactive, the game generated more than $1 billion in worldwide sales in just three days. Now, after multiple delays, Rockstar has scheduled GTA VI for Thursday, November 19, 2026.

And Thursday, unfortunately for employers, is usually a working day.

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Priorities, priorities

A September report from Money found that requests for paid time off on November 19 were already running 9% to 17% above historical averages for the equivalent Thursday, according to data provided by human resources platform BambooHR. Of course, it’s hard to prove GTA is to blame, but the timing is suspicious.

One California automotive parts company, Burger Motorsports, even announced a tongue-in-cheek operational pause around the launch, warning customers that employees might be unavailable because they’re busy exploring Vice City. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also half jokingly predicted that plenty of people would call in sick on November 19.

The latest survey suggests he might have a point.

On October 20, gaming and media company GameSquare released research involving 1,000 full-time employed American gamers.

The results were striking. Ten percent said they planned to skip work on launch day, while another 30% were considering taking time off. Among those considering it, 36% said they might call in sick. Meanwhile, 42% expected the game’s arrival could make them less productive at work.

Of course, these weren’t percentages of all American workers. They came from a sample of people who already play video games, surveyed by a company with a commercial interest in gaming culture. And saying you’ll take a day off is not the same as actually doing it.

But a lot of things are saying November 19 won’t exactly be the most productive day in American history.

Where did the $1 billion figure come from?

The claim appears in a July 2025 report by Spanish broadcaster Cadena SER, which discussed the game’s potential economic consequences with José García Montalvo, an economics professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

The broadcaster suggested that absenteeism could cost the American economy around $1 billion on the game’s first day. Montalvo discussed why younger workers, particularly men aged 18 to 30, and people working remotely in technology might be especially tempted to stay home or spend less time working.

As it so often happens, the claim got spread massively. But it’s not exactly a careful calculation; it’s more like a specialist’s estimate.

One widely circulated explanation assumes 1.5 million absent workers, each producing about $70,000 of economic output annually on average.

But divide that $70,000 across approximately 250 working days, and each worker produces about $280 a day. Multiply that by 1.5 million people, and you get roughly $420 million, not $1 billion.

So, it’s reasonable to expect significant losses on account of GTA being launched, but it’s hard to come up with an accurate prediction.

But this is where the economics gets even more interesting.

Economists have actually studied what games do to working hours

According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2026 report, approximately 212 million Americans play video games at least an hour a week. The average player is 37 years old. And video games really can change how people decide to spend their time.

In a study published in the Journal of Political Economy, economists Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst examined changes in leisure activities and working hours among young American men.

Using time-use surveys and economic modelling, they investigated a simple question: what happens when entertainment becomes significantly more appealing?

Their findings suggested that improvements in recreational computing, including video gaming, had reduced working hours among men aged 21 to 30 by around 2% over the period examined.

But that figure is often misunderstood or misquoted

The researchers weren’t saying that a new game (say, GTA) would cut national productivity by 2%. They were studying longer-term changes in how a particular group of people divided their time between paid work and leisure.

When entertainment becomes better, free time becomes more valuable. A person might prefer an extra evening gaming with friends over working additional hours, just as someone else might choose more time with family or a shorter working week.

But is this really a bad thing?

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question

GTA VI is so big and so intensely expected that it adds the sense of a shared cultural moment. GTA is a cultural phenomenon. And there’s something faintly absurd about describing a day spent doing something enjoyable and cultural as a national economic catastrophe.

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GDP, the standard measure of economic output, tells us how much an economy produces. It doesn’t tell us whether people enjoyed producing it, or whether they would have preferred to do something else.

The OECD explicitly recognises that GDP doesn’t capture everything that matters to people’s lives, including work-life balance and wellbeing. I’m not saying productivity is irrelevant or that employers shouldn’t care about staff shortages. It’s just that the economic value of work and the personal value of free time are different things.

There are plenty of perfectly ordinary reasons to take a vacation day: attend a wedding, visit family, travel somewhere new, or simply rest. Spending the day playing a video game is just another choice, and one that will likely make many people happy.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about GTA VI isn’t how much money it might cost employers. It’s that it’s convinced millions of people how they’d want to spend their Thursday.