Calling in sick on the Monday after the Super Bowl? Your boss is probably okay with it, says Paycom

As millions of Americans gear up for the Super Bowl—stocking the fridge with wing sauce, beer, and myriad other snacks and confections—employers are also preparing for the inevitable avalanche of sick-day requests on Monday.

Last year, the day after Super Bowl Sunday (dubbed “Super Bowl Monday”) saw nearly two-thirds more sick-day requests than the average day in 2024, and 51% more requests than the average day in February, according to recent data from cloud-based human capital management software company Paycom.

Interestingly, employers seem to empathize, as the data also shows that managers approved 91% of sick-day requests on Super Bowl Monday last year, which was the second-highest percentage of approved sick days for the entire year. The data was sourced from sick-day and time-off requests made by 6.8 million workers in Paycom’s data set.

Super Bowl Monday has long been a day when many people call in sick or otherwise take off from work, as many are recovering from the food-and-booze-fueled frenzy of watching the big game. Last year’s Super Bowl LVIII drew nearly 124 million viewers, the largest TV audience on record. For reference, that’s roughly 35% of the U.S. population. 

And workers are already prepared to miss work. Survey data from UKG released last week found that nearly 23 million employees in the U.S. are already planning to stay home on Monday. That’s a significant increase from the 16.1 million who did so last year, and the 18.8 million who did so following the 2023 Super Bowl (which also featured the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles).

But again, UKG’s data also shows that managers are more or less accommodating—perhaps because they want to take a day off themselves. “We launched this research years ago to start a conversation to help organizations prepare for unplanned absences—people playing hooky or ghosting work altogether—because of the Super Bowl and other pop-culture events that impact work,” said Julie Develin, senior partner of HCM advisory at UKG, in a release.

“Although a record number of employees plan to miss work on Monday,” Develin said, “we continue to see forward progress with managers and employees having more open conversations about taking the day off, swapping shifts, or making arrangements to come in late so that the business is covered.”

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