Netflix is planning a major round of layoffs coming as soon as next week that would cut about 5% of its headcount, according to a new report.
The streaming giant plans a significant restructuring that “will impact” about 5% of staffers and “could be announced as early as next week,” according to a report by Puck News, citing anonymous sources.
A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment. It’s not clear which departments would be most heavily affected by the reported cuts.
As of the end of 2025, Netflix said it had about 16,000 full-time employees, which means a 5% reduction in force would eliminate around 800 jobs. Roughly 68% of its workers, about 10,900, were located in the U.S. and Canada as of December.
The last major Netflix layoffs came in 2022, when it axed about 450 staffers following the streamer’s net decline of 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of that year, its first such drop in more than a decade. The company has made additional smaller cutbacks since then, including letting go several dozen members of its global product team earlier in 2026.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO, at last month’s Bloomberg Screentime conference in L.A., said the company is growing — noting that in Q2, it posted double-digit revenue gains in every geographical region — but that “We want to keep growing it faster.”
“Yes, overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” Sarandos said, addressing the slowdown in Netflix user engagement (which was up 2% year-over-year in the first half in 2026). He added that the streamer is “also doing things that create a lot of headwind to that number. Meaning, when we do live programming on Netflix, which is a relatively new thing, we spend about 5% of our content budget on live events. They generate about 1% of our watching.”
For the second quarter, Netflix posted earnings in line with Wall Street forecasts but issued Q3 revenue guidance below analyst expectations, driving the stock price down.
Netflix is scheduled to report third quarter 2026 earnings on Tuesday, Oct. 20, after market close.
Source: variety.com
