A new economic analysis presented at IDWeek 2026 underscores the skyrocketing costs AMR is posing to society. The results showed annual costs approaching $1 trillion—about Switzerland’s GDP— and large enough to erode global GDP.
A second analysis presented at the conference projects that unless new treatments and policies change the trajectory, AMR will cost the US healthcare system $52 billion a year—roughly the same as the budgets of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combined.
In a global economic analysis, Hardik Desai, a public health scientist at AB Plus Multispecialty Hospital in Ahmedabad, India, and nine colleagues found disproportionate harm to low-income regions, with South Asia and East Asia hit hardest.
They also found that blood infections and lower respiratory infections accounted for three-fourths of the costs, and that six bacterial pathogens drove 82 percent of the costs. This level of granularity in the data can help steer AMR resources to address the most serious problems, Desai said. “We have to act on specific [pathogen-antibiotic combinations] where resistance is higher.”
Costly Infections
Previous estimates from health economists had tallied the costs of hospital stays, antibiotic usage and other treatment costs. In the global economic study, Desai and his colleagues instead calculated economic losses across society as healthy life lost, a method called lost welfare analysis.
They started with respected data from two sources. The Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, provided data on worldwide deaths and lost years of healthy life due to 22 bacterial pathogens.1 They cross-checked that with GDP and population data from the World Bank.
The economic costs totaled $845 billion annually worldwide, directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance. When they tallied the cost of infections associated with AMR—where AMR microbes were present in the patient, but causation was unproven—the costs were an eye-popping $3.5 trillion, which is more than 2 percent of global GDP.
That makes AMR-associated infections more costly to society than mental disorders, diabetes and kidney disease, and respiratory disease, though less costly than cardiovascular disease and cancer, Desai reported.
The results revealed that AMR problems vary by region. Different pathogens predominate in different regions, and the major drivers of AMR vary by region as well. “In India, infection prevention is where to act,” Desai tells disAMR. In addition, “you have to educate the clinician not to prescribe antibiotics for viral infection.” In the US, physicians prescribe antibiotics less often, but still incorrectly. There, vaccines, diagnostics and stewardship will make the difference, Desai said.
These results mean that there is no global, one-size-fits-all solution, Desai tells disAMR.
Rising Hospital Costs
A second industry-funded study, presented at IDWeek, focused on rising costs for US hospitals.
Duane Schulthess, CEO of Vital Transformation, a Washington, DC-based health-economics consultancy, and his colleagues focused on the direct clinical costs, rather than broader macroeconomic costs. They analyzed electronic health records of 50,000 patients treated from 2016-2024 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and used cost estimates derived from national figures.
The researchers focused on three common life-threatening conditions: sepsis, hospital-acquired pneumonia, and complicated urinary tract infections, all of which are often caused by resistant bacteria.
They found that AMR costs $21,453 extra per diagnosis compared to an antibiotic-sensitive infection.2 “AMR is directly attributable to four additional days of hospital stays,” Schultess said, as well as a one-third higher rate of hospital re-admission.
As AMR grows, so do the projected costs, when calculated in 2025 dollars: from $31 billion in 2025 to $52 billion in 2045.
“These costs are much bigger than people realize,” Schulthess said.
The costs also dwarf the $6 billion in pull incentives that the US Congress would allocate for new antimicrobials if it passes the current version of the Pasteur Act and it becomes law.3
The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, Pfizer, Merck, GSK, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), and a nonprofit called the Alliance for Aging Research sponsored the study.
