A new report authored by Chad Maisel and Stanford economist Neale Mahoney puts a price tag on the hidden fees, spam calls, and bureaucratic time sinks that eat into American wallets and schedules: at least $165 billion a year. The Groundwork Collaborative released the findings on February 9, 2026, framing the problem as an “annoyance economy” that has expanded over the past two decades as corporations found new ways to profit from consumer frustration. The figure captures not just direct charges but the economic value of time lost to hold queues, insurance paperwork, and unwanted robocalls.
The authors argue that this annoyance economy is not a random byproduct of modern life but a system shaped by deliberate business choices. In their view, companies have learned to monetize friction, turning long wait times, confusing billing structures, and opaque fees into reliable revenue streams. The report, summarized by the Groundwork Collaborative, describes these practices as a kind of “vibes-based tax” on everyday transactions, where consumers pay more in money and time than headline prices or official bills would suggest.
Where the $165 Billion Goes
The single largest slice of the annoyance economy is junk fees, which the report estimates at $90 billion annually. These are the surprise charges tacked onto concert tickets, hotel bills, bank statements, and airline bookings that consumers rarely see until checkout. A separate congressional investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations documented how airlines and hotels have built entire revenue streams around add-on travel fees, from seat-selection surcharges to resort fees that appear nowhere in the advertised room rate. Similar patterns show up in banking, where overdraft and nonsufficient-funds charges can quietly turn a low-cost account into an expensive one.
The remaining $75 billion reflects the dollar value of time Americans burn dealing with corporate friction. To convert wasted hours into economic cost, the report’s authors drew on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ time-use data and wage information from the St. Louis Fed. That methodology means the true burden falls unevenly: an hour stuck on hold costs a minimum-wage worker a larger share of daily earnings than it costs a salaried professional, even though the nominal wage calculation already assigns lower values to lower-paid workers. The annoyance economy, in other words, functions as a regressive tax on patience, hitting people with fewer resources hardest when they can least afford it.
Spam, Scams, and the Phone That Never Stops Ringing
Americans field roughly 130 million scam and illegal marketing calls every day, alongside approximately 20 billion spam texts each month. Those numbers, drawn from the Groundwork report and corroborated by Truecaller’s U.S. spam statistics, represent more than a nuisance. Each answered call carries a time cost, and each successful scam carries a financial one. The sheer volume also degrades trust in legitimate phone communication, pushing more interactions onto slower digital channels and, paradoxically, into longer customer-service queues as people hesitate to pick up unknown numbers.
That queue time is growing. The time Americans spend on the phone with customer service has spiked by 60%, according to Fortune’s coverage of the annoyance economy. The National Customer Rage Survey, which has tracked consumer sentiment since 1976, now shows record highs in frustration, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Companies appear to be making a calculated bet: the cost of staffing better support lines exceeds the revenue lost when angry customers give up and pay, or quietly abandon a refund or dispute. For the business, that tradeoff works. For the consumer, it means time is being extracted as surely as money, and the phone (once a tool for convenience) has become a constant vector for annoyance.
Health Care’s $21.6 Billion Paper Chase
One of the most striking line items in the annoyance economy is the $21.6 billion Americans lose each year to health-care administration. That estimate comes from a peer-reviewed study published in the Academy of Management Discoveries, which measured the time employees spend on phone calls dealing with health insurance claims, billing disputes, and coverage questions. The researchers found that these hassles are not just expensive in aggregate; they are associated with higher stress, increased absenteeism, burnout, and reduced job satisfaction at the individual level. The cost, then, is not borne by patients alone. Employers absorb it through lower productivity, more sick days, and higher turnover as workers struggle to manage their care.
What makes the health-care number especially telling is that it captures only phone-based administration. It does not account for time spent filling out forms, appealing denied claims through written correspondence, or driving to in-person appointments forced by insurer requirements. The $21.6 billion figure is, by design, a floor. And unlike a junk fee on a hotel bill, which a consumer can theoretically avoid by choosing a different hotel, health insurance hassles are largely inescapable for the more than 160 million Americans who get coverage through an employer. Even those who are diligent, organized, and insured through large group plans cannot fully opt out of the phone trees, prior authorizations, and coverage disputes that now define much of the health-care experience.
Regulators Push Back, but the Gap Widens
Regulators have begun to recognize junk fees and friction-based business models as a systemic problem rather than a series of isolated irritations. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has documented a wide range of abusive or opaque charges in its supervisory work on fees, including surprise overdraft penalties, multiple nonsufficient-funds charges on the same transaction, and add-ons that consumers never clearly agreed to. In response, the agency has pushed banks and other financial institutions to simplify disclosures, cap certain fees, and refund charges found to be illegal or deceptive. Similar efforts are underway in travel and entertainment, where policymakers have proposed “all-in pricing” rules that would force companies to display mandatory fees up front.
Yet the Groundwork report, which describes how corporations profit from these headaches, suggests that enforcement has not yet caught up with corporate creativity. Even as some junk fees are curtailed, new ones appear in different guises, such as “convenience” charges for paying online, “processing” fees for tickets, or “administrative” surcharges on utility bills. On the time-wasting side, advances in artificial intelligence and automated call systems can make it cheaper for firms to maintain labyrinthine support structures that filter out all but the most persistent customers. Without stronger rules that target the underlying incentives to generate friction, the annoyance economy is likely to keep expanding.
Can the Annoyance Economy Be Reversed?
The authors of the $165 billion estimate stop short of prescribing a single policy fix, but their findings point toward a mix of transparency requirements, fee caps, and stronger enforcement of existing consumer-protection laws. Making all-in pricing mandatory across sectors would reduce the scope for hidden charges, and stricter limits on overdraft and late fees could shrink some of the most lucrative junk-fee categories. On the communications front, regulators could expand efforts to authenticate legitimate calls and texts, making it easier for consumers to distinguish real outreach from scams and reducing the time cost of screening endless unknown numbers. More aggressive penalties for illegal robocalls and fraudulent marketing could further deter bad actors who currently treat fines as a cost of doing business.
At the same time, the report highlights a cultural and political challenge: many of the costs it identifies are diffuse, small in any single instance, and easy to dismiss as the price of modern convenience. Only when added up, across millions of households, billions of interactions, and countless hours on hold, do they reveal a system that quietly transfers wealth and time from the public to corporate balance sheets. Whether the annoyance economy shrinks or grows will depend not only on how regulators respond, but on whether consumers, workers, and voters come to see these daily frustrations as a shared economic problem rather than a private hassle to endure alone.
More From The Daily Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
Cole Whitaker focuses on the fundamentals of money management, helping readers make smarter decisions around income, spending, saving, and long-term financial stability. His writing emphasizes clarity, discipline, and practical systems that work in real life. At The Daily Overview, Cole breaks down personal finance topics into straightforward guidance readers can apply immediately.
