USDA prices faster chicken lines at $184 million a year — 99% of the cost is new hires at plants with more repetitive-motion injuries

On February 19, 2026, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) proposed letting young chicken plants run their evisceration lines at up to 175 birds per minute, up from the current 140 bpm cap, and turkey plants at up to 60 bpm, up from 55.▸ The agency's own regulatory impact analysis says the change is worth a net $184 million a year to the industry. Buried in the same analysis is a sentence FSIS wrote about its own numbers: the cost side of that math is "most" the wages of the workers plants would have to hire to run the faster lines. A separate document, built from the injury reports those same plants already file, suggests those new hires would be walking into jobs that get measurably harder on the body the faster the line runs.

FSIS ran three scenarios for how many of the nation's 148 chicken plants operating under the New Poultry Inspection System would choose to speed up: a lower case (23 plants), a mid case (58 plants), and an upper case (85 plants).▸ In the mid case — the number FSIS features as its headline estimate — the agency projects $386 million a year in industry cost savings against $202 million in costs, for a net benefit of $184 million, all annualized over a 5-year phase-in. FSIS translates the savings side into a retail-facing number too: about $4.10 per 100 chickens processed, derived from dividing the $386 million estimate by the roughly 9.4 billion young chickens slaughtered in 2024.

Read past the summary table and FSIS says outright where the $202 million in costs comes from: "most of this cost is associated with additional labor to voluntarily increase line speeds."▸ The agency estimates the 58 mid-scenario plants would each need to hire an additional sorter, roughly 11 more production workers, and a manager per line per shift — a mid-point of 2,925 new jobs, at a total annual labor cost (wages plus a benefits-and-overhead factor of two) FSIS puts at $199.98 million. That's 99% of the rule's entire $202 million cost side. In other words, FSIS's own accounting books the paychecks of the workers who'd run the faster lines as a regulatory cost to be netted against the industry's gain — not as a benefit to anyone.

FSIS has a specific reason to believe faster lines don't need more scrutiny for worker safety: its own contracted study.▸ The Poultry Processing Line Speed Evaluation (PULSE) Study, completed in January 2025, found that while 40% of workers across the plants it studied reported work-related pain, that pain "was not reported more frequently at establishments operating at higher line speeds." PULSE concluded musculoskeletal-disorder risk tracked piece rate — the number of chicken parts a worker handles per minute — more closely than line speed itself, and that piece rate can be managed independently of line speed by adding staff. FSIS is using that finding to justify dropping a rule requiring plants to attest annually that they monitor worker safety conditions.

The California Department of Public Health's Occupational Health Branch, working with researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley, ran a different test: not what workers say in a survey, but what actually shows up in the injury reports plants file with OSHA.▸ Pulling 2017-2023 data from OSHA's Injury Tracking Application and linking it to USDA's list of which plants hold line-speed waivers, they found waivered plants had higher total injury rates in every single year of the study — despite an industry-wide decline in injury rates overall. In the detailed 2023 case data, production workers at waivered plants reported repetitive-motion microtask injuries in 52.8% of overexertion cases, against 33.6% at standard-speed plants, and strain, sprain, and tear injuries in 33.9% of traumatic-injury cases, against 23.8% — both gaps statistically significant (p < 0.001). The study's authors caution the comparison can't isolate line speed from other differences between waivered and non-waivered plants (staffing choices among them), but the pattern PULSE's self-report data didn't find shows up clearly in the injuries plants actually recorded.

This piece covers the proposed rule for young chicken and turkey plants under FSIS's New Poultry Inspection System; a separate, not-yet-quantified FSIS proposal would also raise line speeds for swine (pork) slaughter and is not covered here.