Netflix layoffs take back half of the 2,000 jobs it added in 2025

Netflix ended 2024 with about 14,000 full-time employees and ended 2025 with about 16,000, according to its last two annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wednesday it said it would cut roughly 1,000 jobs. Set those numbers side by side and the cull takes back half of a single year's hiring, and still leaves the company about 1,000 people bigger than it was at the end of 2024.

The cuts were first reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed in a memo from co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, which CBS News and TheWrap both obtained. Most of the losses fall in product, technology, legal and human resources. The memo's central line, quoted identically by both outlets, is that "our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full-year forecast."

That is the strange part. Netflix is cutting harder than it did in 2022, when its business was shrinking.

What the filings show

Netflix's annual reports give one headcount a year, and each is rounded, so treat the figures below as approximate. They are still the company's own numbers.

At the end of 2021, Netflix had about 11,300 full-time staff, the figure Variety cited from that year's filing. By the end of 2024 the 10-K put it at about 14,000. That is 2,700 extra people over three years, or roughly 900 a year.

Then came 2025. The latest 10-K reports about 16,000 at 31 December, an increase of around 2,000 in twelve months. That is more than twice the earlier pace.

One thousand out of 16,000 is 6.25%, which is where the widely reported 6% comes from. Take it off, and Netflix lands at about 15,000. That is still more people than it employed at the end of 2024.

So this corrects last year. Netflix built up fast, and it is now unwinding the second half of that build.

Against 2022

The last comparable round came in 2022, and it looked very different. In April that year Netflix reported its first net subscriber loss in more than a decade, 200,000 customers in the first quarter, and forecast losing 2 million more. It cut about 150 full-time staff in May, roughly 2% of its US workforce, and another 300 in June, TechCrunch reported at the time. People Matters and others put the 2022 total at about 450.

Worked against the 11,300 headcount of the day, those two rounds removed about 4% of staff. Wednesday's removes about 6%. In raw numbers it is 2.2 times the 2022 cull.

The businesses behind those two decisions are not comparable either. In the second quarter of 2026 Netflix's revenue was $12.56bn, up 13% on a year earlier, with an operating margin of 33.4%, according to its results statement as reported by Screen and exchange4media. It guides to $51bn to $51.4bn of revenue for the full year.

In 2022 the cuts followed a loss. In 2026 they follow growth that is merely slower than Netflix wants.

How the number grew in five days

The first word came from Matthew Belloni at Puck on 9 October. He reported a restructuring affecting about 5% of staff, and said it could be announced as soon as the week of 12 October. Coverage of that report turned 5% into somewhere between 800 and 850 jobs, depending on which headcount the writer assumed.

Five days later the confirmed figure was 6% and about 1,000. The cut grew between the leak and the memo by something like 150 to 200 jobs. Puck was right on timing and conservative on size.

This is also not the year's first round. TheWrap and People Matters both note that Netflix cut a smaller group from its product team in February.

Why now

Sarandos gave the clearest reason himself last month. "We're not growing as fast as I want us to, and we're working on making that move faster," he said, in remarks UPI attributes to Bloomberg's Screentime conference and TheWrap also quotes.

The share price explains the urgency. Netflix stock has fallen about 25% in 2026, according to TheWrap and Fox 4. CBS puts the drop over the past 12 months at nearly 43%. In July the company guided third-quarter revenue to $12.86bn, which Screen reported fell short of Wall Street's forecasts.

This is a cut made for shareholders by a company that is still growing. That is not a scandal; it is how listed companies behave. It does mean the 1,000 people leaving are paying for a hiring year their employer now regrets, rather than for any failure of the business they worked in.

The pressure on the streaming side of the industry is not unique to Netflix. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are folding two services into one app with no agreed name or date, and Netflix has spent the autumn bending its own rules, giving Greta Gerwig's Narnia 49 days in cinemas after offering 14.

What happens on 20 October

Netflix publishes its third-quarter results on Tuesday 20 October at about 13:01 Pacific time, followed by a video interview with Sarandos, Peters and chief financial officer Spence Neumann. It stopped reporting subscriber numbers last year, so the questions will be about revenue, margin and the full-year forecast the memo promised to hit.

The one number nobody has yet is the cost of the cull. If Netflix books a restructuring charge, Tuesday's statement is where it will appear.