Study: Smokers Earn Less and Have a Harder Time Finding Jobs

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Smoking has been associated with cancers and other chronic diseases, but a new study from Stanford School Medicine now links smoking with earning less and having a harder time finding a job, Science Daily reports.

For the study, researchers studied job hunters in the San Francisco area between 2013 and 2015. About half were smokers and half were not.

After a year, twice as many nonsmokers had jobs.

“Among smokers re-employed at one year, on average, their hourly income was $5 less relative to reemployed nonsmokers: $15.10 versus $20.27, a 25.5 percent difference,” said Judith Prochaska of Stanford University and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine.

According to researchers, the average cost per person for smoking per year was $8,300.

“We did find when we interviewed the smokers that they prioritized spending on tobacco more so than other factors that might help their job search,” Prochaska added.