How many people work at Microsoft? Microsoft employed approximately 228,000 people on a full-time basis as of June 30, 2025, with 125,000 in the U.S. and 103,000 internationally, according to the fiscal 2025 Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The same 228,000 total was reported a year earlier on June 30, 2024, per the prior-year SEC filing.

It is Microsoft’s first two-year headcount plateau since the 2014 to 2016 Nokia wind-down. Composition matters more than total: in FY25, operations grew by 3,000 while R&D, sales and marketing, and G&A each shed 1,000, encoding the AI infrastructure pivot.

Key Takeaways

Microsoft ended fiscal 2025 with 228,000 full-time employees globally, 125,000 in the U.S. and 103,000 internationally, unchanged from the year-end fiscal 2024 total.
Operations headcount grew by 3,000 in fiscal 2025 to 89,000, while R&D shed 1,000 to 80,000, sales and marketing shed 1,000 to 44,000, and general and administration shed 1,000 to 15,000.
On July 2, 2025, Microsoft announced layoffs of approximately 9,000 employees, affecting less than 4% of its global workforce, the second major round of the calendar year.
On May 13, Microsoft cut 3% of employees, about 6,000 people across all levels, teams, and geographies, with 1,985 reductions tied to the Redmond headquarters.
Microsoft’s workforce grew 22.1% in fiscal 2022, from 181,000 to 221,000, a 40,000-person net add.
Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2026 10-Q states total company headcount declined year-over-year for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, the first reported decline since the 2023 layoff cycle.
In April 2026, Microsoft launched its first-ever voluntary employee retirement program, with about 8,750 US employees eligible out of the 125,000-person US workforce, a 7.0% share.

Editor’s Choice

Operations, including datacenter operations and product support, employed 89,000 people at fiscal year-end 2025, the largest of the four functions Microsoft discloses.
Product research and development employed 80,000 people, sales and marketing 44,000, and general and administration 15,000 as of June 30, 2025.
Microsoft’s headcount climbed from 128,000 in fiscal 2014 to 228,000 in fiscal 2025, a decade-long expansion of about 78.1%.
Microsoft expects headcount to further decline on a year-over-year basis in the next fiscal year, per CFO Amy Hood’s commentary on the fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call.
In calendar 2025, Microsoft’s two announced mass-layoff rounds alone totalled about 15,000 employees, not counting January performance cuts and at least 300 additional eliminations in June.
Microsoft predicted $900 million in one-time costs for fiscal Q4 2026 tied to the voluntary retirement program.
Microsoft Cloud revenue grew 29% to $54.5 billion in fiscal Q3 2026, the same quarter the company reported its year-over-year headcount decline.

Microsoft Employee Count by Fiscal Year 2014 to 2025

Microsoft’s twelve-year fiscal-year employee count comes directly from the company’s annual Form 10-K disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with year-over-year deltas cross-referenced against the publicly available Macrotrends time series tied to those same SEC filings.

Fiscal 2014 (ended June 30, 2014): 128,000 employees, a 29.29% increase from the prior year.
Fiscal 2015: 118,000 employees, a 7.81% decline.
Fiscal 2016: 114,000 employees, a further 3.39% decline, the low point of the decade.
Fiscal 2017: 124,000 employees, up 8.77%, the start of the cloud-era ramp.
Fiscal 2018: 131,000 employees, up 5.65%.
Fiscal 2019: 144,000 employees, up 9.92%.
Fiscal 2020: 163,000 employees, up 13.19%, the pandemic cloud surge.
Fiscal 2021: 181,000 employees, up 11.04%.
Fiscal 2022: 221,000 employees, up 22.1%, the largest single-year increase ever.
Fiscal 2023: 221,000 employees, flat year over year after the January 2023 layoff round.
Fiscal 2024: 228,000 employees, up 3.17%.
Fiscal 2025: 228,000 employees, flat year over year.

Microsoft Workforce by Function

Operations: 89,000 employees as of June 30, 2025, including datacenter operations, product support, consulting services, and manufacturing and distribution.
Product research and development: 80,000 employees, the second-largest function.
Sales and marketing: 44,000 employees.
General and administration: 15,000 employees, the smallest function.

Recent Developments

April 29, 2026: Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2026 10-Q discloses that total company headcount declined year-over-year for the quarter ended March 31, 2026.
April 2026: Microsoft launched its first-ever voluntary employee retirement program, with about 8,750 US employees eligible and $900 million in one-time costs predicted for fiscal Q4 2026.
July 2, 2025: Microsoft announced 9,000 layoffs across teams, geographies, and levels of experience, the second day of fiscal 2026.
May 13, 2025: Microsoft announced 6,000 layoffs, about 3% of its workforce, with 1,985 reductions tied to the Redmond headquarters.
January 2025: Microsoft cut less than 1% of headcount based on performance evaluations, the first round of the calendar year.
July 30, 2025: Microsoft filed its FY2025 Form 10-K, confirming a flat 228,000 year-end headcount for the second consecutive year.

Microsoft Employees: US vs International

US employees: 125,000 as of June 30, 2025, down 1,000 from the prior year.
US employees: 126,000 as of June 30, 2024.
International employees: 103,000 as of June 30, 2025, up 1,000 from the prior year.
International employees: 102,000 as of June 30, 2024.
US share of total workforce: 54.8% at fiscal year-end 2025.
US share of total workforce: 55.3% at fiscal year-end 2024.

Region	FY24 (Jun 30, 2024)	FY25 (Jun 30, 2025)	YoY Delta
United States	126,000	125,000	-1,000
International	102,000	103,000	+1,000
Total	228,000	228,000	0

Source: Microsoft Form 10-K filings FY2024 and FY2025

What Changed Between FY24 and FY25

Operations: +3,000 to 89,000 (datacenter and product support staffing absorbed every available slot).
R&D: –1,000 to 80,000.
Sales and marketing: –1,000 to 44,000.
General and administration: –1,000 to 15,000.
Net total: 0 change.

By the numbers: Operations grew by 3,000 employees in fiscal 2025 while every other function shed 1,000, a net redeployment that left total headcount unchanged at 228,000 yet shifted the function mix toward datacenter operations and away from R&D, sales, and G&A by a combined 3 percentage points.

The 2025 Layoff Trio

January 2025: Microsoft cut less than 1% of headcount based on performance evaluations.
May 13, 2025: Microsoft announced 6,000 layoffs across all levels, teams, and geographies.
Washington state filings showed Microsoft reduced 1,985 positions tied to its Redmond headquarters in the May round, including 1,510 in office.
June 2025: Microsoft eliminated at least 300 additional positions between the May and July rounds.
July 2, 2025: Microsoft announced an additional 9,000 layoffs, less than 4% of its global workforce, on the second day of fiscal 2026.

We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace, read the email from a Microsoft spokesperson. The spokesperson issued near-identical statements across the May and July rounds, a close paraphrase that signalled the cuts were a single deliberate program rather than two independent decisions.

Microsoft Cloud Revenue and Headcount Decoupling

Microsoft Cloud revenue alone reached $54.5 billion in fiscal Q3 2026, a 29% year-over-year increase recorded in the same quarter the company disclosed a year-over-year headcount decline.

Key finding: Microsoft Cloud revenue grew 29% in fiscal Q3 2026 while total company headcount declined year over year in the same quarter, an early indication that cloud revenue scale is no longer tracking headcount one-for-one.

Microsoft’s Operations Headcount and the AI Capex Cycle

Microsoft’s operations function carries the datacenter staffing footprint and is the only segment that grew in fiscal 2025. The growth tracks the surging AI capital-expenditure run-rate, which makes operations the most labor-intensive function for any AI-first cloud hyperscaler.

Operations grew from 86,000 employees at June 30, 2024 to 89,000 at June 30, 2025, a 3,000-employee gain.
Operations now represents about 39.0% of Microsoft’s total workforce, the highest share among the four reported functions.
Operations expanded by approximately 3.5% year over year in fiscal 2025, while every other function contracted.
The operations function spans datacenter operations, product support and consulting services, and manufacturing and distribution, per the FY2025 10-K function-breakdown disclosure.

Microsoft Hiring Cycle: 2014 to 2026 in Context

Microsoft’s twelve-year headcount arc breaks into three distinct chapters, each driven by a different strategic catalyst, and each visible as a structural inflection in the Form 10-K filings on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Chapter one (FY2014 to FY2016): headcount fell from 128,000 to 114,000, a 10.9% contraction across the three-year window.
Chapter two (FY2017 to FY2022): headcount climbed from 124,000 to 221,000, a 78.2% expansion in five years, tracking the Azure cloud ramp and the early Teams / Microsoft 365 buildout.
Chapter three (FY2023 to FY2025): headcount oscillated between 221,000 and 228,000, a plateau driven by the January 2023 layoff of 10,000 employees, a single year of recovery hiring (FY2024), and the 2025 layoff trio that returned the year-end count to its FY2024 level.
The cumulative trajectory: today’s 228,000 workforce is 2.0x the 2016 trough, and twice that ratio (4.0x) is what the function-level capex commitments would have implied without the 2025 redeployment.

Microsoft Headcount vs Big Tech Peers

Microsoft’s 228,000 sits in the upper-middle of the big-tech headcount table, well below Amazon‘s logistics-heavy total.

Microsoft: 228,000 full-time employees as of June 30, 2025.
Microsoft fiscal 2022 added 40,000 employees on a net basis, from 181,000 at FY2021 year-end to 221,000 at FY2022 year-end.
Microsoft’s product R&D function alone employs 80,000 people as of June 30, 2025.

FY26 Q3 Headcount Signal: Building Toward a Net Decline

Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2026 10-Q states total company headcount declined year-over-year for the quarter ended March 31, 2026.
For the nine months ended March 31, 2026, the 10-Q again states total company headcount declined year-over-year.
CFO Amy Hood said Microsoft expects headcount to further decline on a year-over-year basis in the next fiscal year, speaking on the fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call.

Worth noting: Microsoft did not disclose the actual fiscal Q3 2026 headcount figure, only that it was lower than the comparable quarter in fiscal 2025; the next hard-count datapoint will be the fiscal Q4 2026 earnings release in late July 2026.

The 7% Voluntary Retirement Program

About 8,750 US employees are eligible based on years of service and age, representing 7% of the 125,000-person US workforce.
Microsoft predicted $900 million in one-time costs for fiscal Q4 2026 tied to the program.
Implied cost per accepted retirement: approximately $103,000 if all 8,750 eligible employees accept, a figure consistent with severance benchmarks for tenured technology workers.
Microsoft framed the program as part of “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility”, language echoed from CFO Amy Hood’s earnings commentary.

A voluntary retirement window paired with explicit headcount-decline guidance signals a move from “shrink-and-redirect” to net contraction in fiscal 2027.

Why Did Microsoft Lay Off 6,000 Employees in May 2025?

Microsoft framed the May 13, 2025 cut as organizational repositioning toward AI and cloud services. The cuts hit software engineering, LinkedIn, and Xbox divisions.

Microsoft Year-over-Year Headcount Step-Changes

Microsoft’s headcount disclosures show several inflection points in the FY2014 to FY2025 series, each visible as a step-change in the Form 10-K filings.

The FY2014 jump to 128,000 was a 29.29% single-year increase, the steepest year-over-year percentage change in the FY2014 to FY2025 disclosed series.
The FY2017 step-change from 114,000 to 124,000 added approximately 10,000 employees year over year.
The FY2019 step-change from 131,000 to 144,000 added approximately 13,000 employees year over year.
Microsoft’s FY2022 added 40,000 employees net, from 181,000 at FY2021 year-end to 221,000 at FY2022 year-end.
Microsoft’s net headcount adds since FY2014 total 100,000 employees across the twelve fiscal years of disclosure.

Microsoft Total Employees vs Active Hiring Plans

Microsoft’s filings differentiate between the static headcount snapshot on June 30 and the hiring activity throughout the year. The flat year-end figure masks substantial intra-year churn from voluntary attrition, layoffs, performance-based exits, and offsetting new hires concentrated in datacenter operations and AI-adjacent roles.

Microsoft employed approximately 228,000 people on a full-time basis as of June 30, 2025, the static snapshot all 10-K disclosures anchor to.
In calendar 2025, Microsoft executed at least four discrete reduction events, aggregating to roughly 15,000 announced cuts.
Calendar 2025 announced cuts represent about 6.6% of the year-end workforce, yet net headcount stayed at 228,000.
Microsoft expects further year-over-year headcount declines in the next fiscal year, per CFO Amy Hood’s earnings-call guidance.
Microsoft Cloud revenue grew 29% to $54.5 billion in fiscal Q3 2026, a sign that headcount is decoupling from cloud-revenue scale.

How Many Millionaires Work at Microsoft?

Microsoft does not publish a millionaire-employee count in any SEC filing; its only direct equity disclosure is aggregate stock-based compensation, and tens-of-thousands “stock millionaire” tallies are third-party estimates.

What Is a Level 60 Salary at Microsoft?

Level 60 is Microsoft’s senior individual contributor band (Senior Software Engineer or equivalent). Microsoft does not publish per-level salary bands in its SEC filings; all level-specific figures originate from voluntary employee submissions on sites such as Levels.fyi and Glassdoor.

Conclusion

Microsoft enters fiscal 2027 with 228,000 employees on the books as of June 30, 2025. The plateau is the deliberate product of a shrink-and-redirect cycle: operations absorbed every available slot in FY2025 while every other function shed positions to the AI buildout.

The fiscal Q3 2026 10-Q is the moment the plateau cracked. The next checkpoint is the fiscal 2026 10-K in late July 2026, where the 228,000 two-year run will likely give way to the first net contraction in Microsoft’s modern history since the 2014 to 2016 Nokia adjustment.