Microsoft Buyout: A Quarter of Staff Eligible as Sales Outgrow Headcount

By Stock Titan Editorial Team Published October 27, 2026, 04:28 AM EDT

Is Microsoft doing layoffs?

The offer came in a memo from Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer, which the company posted on its official blog on October 26. She called it a Voluntary Exit Offer and wrote that it “gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support.”

The same memo says the offer “also gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs.” It gives those teams a voluntary route to change, and it does not say whether layoffs could follow. The memo never uses the word buyout or the word layoff, and it gives no head count. The 60,000 is the figure Microsoft gave reporters that day, as Reuters and Bloomberg reported. Coleman also wrote that the offer “is new for us” and that the company would learn from it.

Microsoft has cut jobs outright this year. In a July 6 post, Coleman said the company was “eliminating around 4,800 roles, about 2.1% of our global workforce,” mostly in its commercial and Xbox groups. That post also warned staff that “there will be more changes ahead.”

So the offer is voluntary, but it lands at a company that has already told its people more change is coming. Microsoft had made no filing about the offer with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US market regulator, by the evening of October 26. Its filing list on the SEC’s EDGAR system shows none.

Who can take the Microsoft buyout?

Microsoft’s memo sets the outline. The offer is open to “eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at level 70 and below.” It is “time-limited” and comes with “financial support and career planning resources.” Each eligible person was to get an email with their own terms within hours.

Not every team is in. “Some organizations are providing the Voluntary Exit Offer, and some are not,” Coleman wrote, depending on each business’s “priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs.” Bloomberg reported on October 26 that a Microsoft spokesperson said some staff focused on data centers, sales and marketing are not eligible.

Microsoft has not published the amounts. The same Bloomberg report said the spokesperson described benefits similar to Microsoft’s standard severance package, the pay a company gives when a job ends. Microsoft has not published a deadline. Reports citing the spokesperson, which StockTitan could not check against a Microsoft document, put the decision in early December and departures at the end of the year.

Microsoft also expects fewer takers than it had for its retirement offer in the spring, the spokesperson told Bloomberg. Coleman’s memo ties the two together, saying the new offer “builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program.”

How many people work at Microsoft?

Microsoft counts its staff once a year, on June 30, in its annual report for fiscal 2026. That report gives “approximately 223,000 people on a full-time basis.” A year earlier the fiscal 2025 report counted 228,000.

Set against that June count, the roughly 60,000 eligible people come to about 27% of the company, by our calculation. The real share in the four countries cannot be worked out, because Microsoft splits its staff only into US and international.

Show the data

Part	Value	Squares
Can take the exit offer	27	27
Everyone else	73	73

For a sense of scale, 60,000 is a little under the entire workforce of Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. Meta reported 66,775 employees at September 30 in its latest quarterly report.

The year’s drop came mostly from the people who build products. Microsoft’s report shows research and development staff down from 80,000 to 77,000, with smaller dips in sales and in administration. Operations, the group that includes running its data centers, held at 89,000.

Show the data

Item	June 30, 2025	June 30, 2026	Change
Operations	89K	89K	0K
Research and development	80K	77K	-3K
Sales and marketing	44K	43K	-1K
General and administration	15K	14K	-1K

That matters for this offer, since some data center teams are among those left out of it, by the spokesperson’s account to Bloomberg.

Microsoft layoffs since 2023

Show the data

Date	Event
2023-01-18	Microsoft announces about 10,000 job cuts
2025-07-24	Satya Nadella’s memo acknowledges layoffs
2026-04-29	Retirement offer cost estimated at about $900 million
2026-07-06	About 4,800 roles eliminated
2026-10-26	Voluntary Exit Offer announced
2026-10-28	Results for the July to September quarter due

The last layoff whose cost Microsoft spelled out in an annual report came in January 2023. Its fiscal 2023 annual report says it cut “approximately 10,000 jobs” and set aside $800 million for severance pay, part of a larger one-time cost.

In 2025 the company cut jobs again without putting a total in its annual report, and neither its fiscal 2025 nor its fiscal 2026 report gives a severance cost. Chief executive Satya Nadella addressed it in a July 2025 memo, writing that “our overall headcount is relatively unchanged” even as the company had gone through layoffs. He added that Microsoft was “investing more in CapEx than ever before,” meaning money spent on buildings and equipment.

This spring brought a retirement offer. On April 29, on the call where executives discuss quarterly results, finance chief Amy Hood estimated its one-time cost at “roughly $900 million,” according to Microsoft’s investor relations page. By July, Coleman wrote, “more than 30% of eligible employees” had chosen to take it.

On the July 29 call, Hood cited “lower-than-expected expenses related to the Voluntary Retirement Program” in the quarter, without giving the amount. So the spring offer cost less than Microsoft had planned for that quarter.

A smaller staff was part of the plan. In July, Hood said that “Total company headcount declined 2% year-over-year” at the end of the June quarter. On the April call, looking ahead to fiscal 2027, she had said “we expect headcount will decrease year-over-year.”

Microsoft sales, staff and spending since 2023

Show the data

Item	Fiscal 2023	Fiscal 2026	Change
Sales	100	157	+57
Full-time staff	100	101	+1
Buildings and equipment	100	413	+313

The chart puts three numbers from Microsoft’s annual reports on one scale, with each line starting at 100 in fiscal 2023, so 157 means 57% higher. Full-time staff rose by less than 1%. Part of the sales rise came with a purchase. Microsoft completed its takeover of the video game maker Activision Blizzard on October 13, 2023, according to its fiscal 2024 annual report.

Capital spending is where the line takes off. The cash Microsoft spent on property and equipment, mostly buildings, servers and chips for its data centers, rose from $28.1 billion in fiscal 2023 to $115.9 billion in fiscal 2026.

Spread across the June head count, that comes to about $520,000 for every employee last year, by our calculation. It is a measure of scale, since the money buys data centers for customers, and it does not mean equipment handed to each worker.

Show the data

Category	Value
2021	$114K
2022	$108K
2023	$127K
2024	$195K
2025	$283K
2026	$520K

The spending is still climbing. On the July 29 call, Hood said Microsoft expected about $175 billion of capital spending for calendar 2026, a figure that counts some leases. She said spending in the current fiscal year “will grow.”

Is Microsoft replacing workers with AI?

In the July 6 post about that month’s 4,800 cuts, Coleman wrote that “the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI,” while adding that “AI is changing how work gets done.” The October memo says nothing about AI either way.

The numbers above show spending on buildings and equipment growing far faster than the workforce. They do not show whether Microsoft’s pay bill fell, or whether savings from the offer will go into that spending.

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