OBJECTIVES: To estimate the economic burden of lost productivity and healthcare resource use associated to tobacco in the Brazilian population among smoking and non-smoking/ex-smoking employees. METHODS: A structured search was performed on MEDLINE database (via PubMed) using the MesH Database terms in accordance with the following terms (("Costs and Cost Analysis" [Mesh]) AND ("Smoking" [Mesh]) AND (" absenteeism" [Mesh]) AND ("presenteeism" [Mesh])), as well as the cost of absence days due to health events retrieved from national labor legislations; and average wage was retrieved from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE) 2.013. RESULTS: The disease costs related to tobacco are Cardiovascular disease (CVD) BRL 27,845.32; stroke BRL 20,591.24; Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) BRL 21,328.59; pneumonia BRL 1,111.82; lung cancer BRL 67,225.83; other cancers BRL 85,524.46. When comparing the productivity and absence days, the smokers lose 62.1% more days than nonsmokers and 41.34% than ex-smokers, which corresponds to BRL 1,326.62 in terms of annual monetary average cost. Additionally, it was found that the life expectancy of male smokers corresponds to 75.30 years; for females, it already was 79.77 years. That means a loss of 5.03 and 4.5 years, respectively, when compared to the expected useful lives of the the nonsmoking population. CONCLUSIONS: Therefore, smoking employees can cost, on unproductive days, almost 3 times more than non-smokers and 2 times more than ex-smokers, besides the cost related to the treatment of stroke, COPD and CVD, and others.