Software Engineer Layoff Statistics 2026: Companies, Roles, AI Impact

Software developers aged 22 to 25 saw employment fall nearly 20% from their late 2022 peak by July 2025, according to Stanford Digital Economy Lab research using ADP payroll data. That single cohort decline reframes the entire narrative around tech layoffs, which most observers describe as a broad correction across all engineering levels.

The data points compiled below cover aggregate tech layoff totals from Layoffs.fyi, company-level cuts at Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce, seniority-level employment shifts from Stanford and Indeed Hiring Lab, AI-automation drivers cited by chief executives on the record, and the BLS Occupational Outlook projections for software developers through 2034. Readers tracking the broader workforce picture can also review our AI job loss data for cross-occupation context.

Key Takeaways

• Stanford found early-career workers in AI-exposed jobs saw a 13% relative employment decline since late 2022, with software developers aged 22 to 25 falling nearly 20% from peak.
• Microsoft cut roughly 6,000 jobs in May 2025 and another 9,000 in July 2025, totaling over 15,000 across the year.
• Amazon announced 14,000 corporate role eliminations in late October 2025, recording an estimated $1.8 billion in severance costs.
• Salesforce reduced support headcount from 9,000 to about 5,000, and CEO Marc Benioff said the company hired no new engineers in fiscal year 2026.
• Indeed Hiring Lab reported software development job postings down 36.4% versus February 2020 and down 6.7% year over year as of October 2025.
• Workers with multiple AI skills earn a salary premium estimated near 43% above non-AI counterparts, according to industry pay studies cited by Acceler8 Talent.
• BLS projects software developer, QA analyst, and tester employment to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034, with about 129,200 annual openings.

Editor’s Choice

• Layoffs.fyi tracked over 152,000 tech layoffs across 551 companies in 2024.
• The 2025 total reached 122,549 layoffs across 257 companies, roughly 20% below the 2024 figure.
• BLS May 2024 OEWS data shows a software developer median annual wage of $133,080, with the top 10% earning more than $211,450.
• Software developers, QA analysts, and testers held about 1.7 million jobs in 2024, per the BLS.
• Meta cut about 3,600 jobs in February 2025, framed as a performance-based reduction targeting roughly 5% of staff.
• Computer programmer employment is projected to decline 6% from 2024 to 2034, even as software developer roles grow 15%.

Recent Developments

• April 2026: Meta announced plans to cut roughly 10% of staff while pouring billions into AI investment, per CNN reporting.
• April 2026: CNBC reported that combined Meta and Microsoft job cuts approaching 20,000 raised concerns of an AI-driven labor crisis.
• November 2025: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy defended the 14,000 corporate cuts as culture-driven, not AI-driven, in an earnings call statement.
• October 2025: Indeed Hiring Lab reported software development postings down 6.7% year over year, marking persistent weakness.
• September 2025: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff confirmed 4,000 customer support roles cut as Agentforce AI took over routine conversations.
• July 2025: Microsoft announced approximately 9,000 layoffs, equivalent to about 4% of its global workforce.

Aggregate Tech Layoff Totals

• Layoffs.fyi recorded over 152,000 tech employees laid off across 551 companies in 2024.
• The 2025 figure tracked roughly 122,549 affected employees across 257 companies, a year-over-year reduction of about 20%.
• The 2023 peak reached 429,608 total tech layoffs, more than triple the 2025 number.
• Across the three-year window, the aggregate total exceeds 700,000 tech sector job losses.
• Layoff tracker site TrueUp logged similar 2025 totals close to 123,000 affected employees.
• Q1 2025 alone accounted for 22,692 tech employees laid off across 81 companies.
• The fact that 2025 cuts span fewer companies, 257 versus 551, signals concentration among larger employers.
• Industry analysts at Crunchbase News observed that 2024 and 2025 combined remained well below the 2022 to 2023 wave that produced over 600,000 cuts.

Source: Layoffs.fyi, TrueUp Layoffs Tracker, Crunchbase News

Subscribe To Our Newsletter!

Be the first to get exclusive offers and the latest news.

Email address

Subscribe Now

Software Engineer Cuts at Major Tech Companies

• Microsoft cut roughly 6,000 jobs in May 2025 with a focus on software engineering positions, per GeekWire and Reuters reporting on internal memos.
• The company followed with another 9,000 cuts in July 2025, equivalent to about 4% of its global workforce.
• Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles in late October 2025, the largest single Amazon cut since the 27,000 trim in late 2022.
• Amazon disclosed estimated severance costs of $1.8 billion related to the October round.
• Meta cut about 3,600 roles in February 2025, framed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a 5% performance-based reduction.
• Meta returned in April 2026 with a planned 10% staff reduction tied to AI investment, per CNN. Historical staffing context lives in our Meta employee count coverage.
• Salesforce reduced its support division from 9,000 to about 5,000 headcount, a 44% reduction in that function.
• Google trimmed hundreds of roles across Android, Pixel, and Chrome teams during 2025, smaller in scale than Microsoft or Amazon cuts. For aggregate context, see our Google workforce data.

Source: Microsoft GeekWire reporting, Amazon CEO statement, Meta internal memo, Salesforce earnings call, CNN April 2026 report

Software Engineer Layoffs by Seniority Level

Stanford Digital Economy Lab research found that early-career workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations experienced a 13% relative decline in employment since late 2022. Among 22-to-25-year-old software developers specifically, employment fell nearly 20% from its late 2022 peak by July 2025.

• Stanford ADP-payroll analysis showed early-career workers in the most AI-exposed occupations saw a 16% relative employment decline.
• Software developer employment for ages 22 to 25 fell roughly 20% from its late 2022 peak by July 2025.
• For workers aged 30 and over in the highest AI-exposure categories, employment grew between 6% and 12% from late 2022 to May 2025.
• Indeed Hiring Lab reported senior tech job titles down 19% versus five years earlier, while standard or junior titles fell 34% as of February 2025.
• Big tech entry-level hiring dropped more than 50% over the last three years, according to Stanford’s accompanying employment-trend dataset.
• UK junior developer openings fell nearly one-third versus 2022 levels, per LinkedIn workforce reports.
• Across major EU markets, junior tech positions declined about 35% in 2024 according to LinkedIn, Indeed, and Eures aggregated data.

Source: Stanford Digital Economy Lab “Canaries in the Coal Mine” working paper, Indeed Hiring Lab February 2025 report

AI Automation as a Driver of Software Engineer Cuts

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in early 2025 that “maybe 20-30% of the code” in some Microsoft coding projects is now generated by AI, a public acknowledgment that came months before the company’s May 2025 software-engineering-focused layoff round. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in a September 2, 2025, CNBC interview confirming the support division cuts, said directly that “I need less heads.”

• Microsoft’s May 2025 round centered on software engineering positions, per GeekWire reporting on internal memos.
• Nadella’s 20% to 30% AI-generated code claim covers select coding projects, not the company’s entire codebase.
• Salesforce hired zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026, with Benioff citing AI-powered coding tools as the reason.
• Salesforce’s Agentforce product handles roughly 50% of all customer conversations, with the other half routed to humans.
• Salesforce reported a support-cost reduction of about 17% since deploying agentic AI in customer service.
• The four roles most affected during AI restructuring rounds, per industry analyst rollups: software engineers and developers, QA engineers, product managers, and project managers.
• Amazon’s October 2025 announcement linked the cuts explicitly to “efficiency gains” from artificial intelligence in a separate Galetti memo, even as Jassy publicly framed them as cultural.

Source: CNBC Salesforce interview, GeekWire Microsoft reporting, Amazon corporate statements

By the numbers: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff confirmed in a 2025 CNBC interview that the company’s support headcount fell from 9,000 to about 5,000 as AI-powered tools handled routine conversations, and Salesforce hired zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. The shift represents the clearest CEO-level admission of AI substitution for engineering roles to date.

Software Developer Job Postings and Hiring Decline

Indeed Hiring Lab’s data feed for software development postings showed openings down 36.4% versus the February 1, 2020, pre-pandemic baseline as of October 10, 2025. The same series posted a 6.7% year-over-year decline, marking software development as one of the hardest-hit occupational categories on the platform.

• Software development postings remained 33% below February 2020 levels through Q3 2025, per Indeed Hiring Lab data.
• Year-over-year decline of 6.7% as of October 10, 2025, outpaced most other occupational segments tracked by the platform.
• The software-engineering job-openings index hit a five-year low during 2025, according to The Pragmatic Engineer’s analysis of FRED-published Indeed data.
• Earlier in 2025, software development postings were down 9.5% in the year to January 17, 2025, before easing slightly through the summer.
• Junior or standard tech titles in February 2025 sat 34% below five-year-prior levels.
• Senior tech titles in the same period were down a comparatively shallower 19%.
• Experience requirements have tightened across remaining postings, per Indeed Hiring Lab’s July 2025 analysis.

BLS Software Developer Employment Outlook

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook reports that software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers held about 1.7 million jobs in 2024, with overall employment in the combined category projected to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034. For comparison, computer programmer roles, tracked separately, are projected to decline 6% over the same window.

• BLS counted approximately 1.7 million software developer, QA analyst, and tester jobs in 2024.
• The same category is projected to add jobs at a 15% rate, much faster than the average for all occupations.
• About 129,200 annual openings are projected for the combined category over the 2024 to 2034 decade.
• Computer programmer roles, a smaller and older classification, held about 121,200 jobs in 2024.
• Computer programmer employment is projected to fall 6% by 2034, even with about 5,500 annual openings.
• Software quality assurance analysts and testers alone accounted for about 201,700 jobs in 2024.
• The divergence between BLS-classified software developers and computer programmers reflects a shift in role mix toward higher-skill development work.

Software Developer Wages and AI Specialist Premium

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data for May 2024 placed the median annual wage at $133,080, with the bottom 10% earning under $79,850 and the top 10% earning above $211,450. AI-specialist roles command additional premiums on top of this baseline, with multi-skill AI engineers reaching the strongest pay differentials.

• Software developer median annual wage stood at $133,080 as of May 2024, per BLS OEWS.
• The bottom 10% of software developers earned less than $79,850 annually in May 2024.
• The top 10% earned more than $211,450, a roughly 2.6x spread between deciles.
• Software QA analysts and testers had a median annual wage of $102,610 in May 2024, per the same OEWS dataset.
• AI engineer base salaries averaged about $206,000 in 2025, climbing roughly 7% in Q1 2026, per Acceler8 Talent’s market-rates survey.
• Workers with AI skills earned about 28% more than their counterparts without, with multi-AI-skill workers commanding closer to 43% premiums.
• Meta’s 2025 H-1B visa filings showed software engineer base pay between $124,000 and $450,000, with the highest AI roles reaching $650,000 in base pay.

Key finding: US Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2024 OEWS data placed software developer median annual wage at $133,080, with the top 10% clearing $211,450. AI-specialist roles, per Acceler8 Talent’s 2025 survey, average about $206,000 base, and multi-AI-skill workers see roughly 43% salary premiums over non-AI peers.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey: Employment Snapshot

The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey collected responses from over 49,000 developers across 177 countries. In the United States, 74.8% of respondents reported full-time employment, with the remainder split between freelancers, students, retirees, the unemployed, and respondents who declined to answer.

• Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey reached more than 49,000 professional and student developers globally.
• The United States subset showed 74.8% of developers in full-time employment as of mid-2025.
• About 5.6% of US respondents identified as full-time students, with 10% reporting freelance work.
• The remaining 9.6% of US respondents fell into the unemployed, retired, or no-information categories combined.
• Germany posted the highest formal-employment rate among the top-five countries at 76%.
• The United Kingdom followed closely at 75% formal-employment among surveyed developers.
• Across all surveyed countries, the average employment rate hovered near 70%, consistent with prior-year survey waves. The same survey also documents AI tool adoption among developers, which we cover in our shadow AI usage statistics breakdown.

Reasons Cited for Software Engineer Layoffs

• Microsoft’s stated rationale for 2025 cuts emphasized trimming management layers and shifting capital toward AI infrastructure investment.
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy framed the 14,000 corporate cuts as primarily about culture and agility, telling investors they were “not really financially driven, and not even AI-driven, not right now at least.”
• Meta’s February 2025 round was officially performance-based, targeting roughly 5% of staff, though laid-off employees disputed the “low performer” label publicly.
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff explicitly cited AI labor substitution, stating “I need less heads” with reference to Agentforce capabilities.
• Industry analysts at Crunchbase News estimated about 25% of March 2026 cuts traced to AI and automation, with roughly 75% still attributable to cost discipline and unit-level restructuring.
• The lagging effect of 2020 to 2022 over-hiring continues to drive non-AI cuts, particularly at firms that doubled engineering headcount during the pandemic-era cheap-capital window.
• Strategic capital reallocation, where layoff savings fund AI compute and data-center buildout, appears in nearly every Big Tech earnings call from 2025; the same shift pulls headcount into chip and infrastructure firms, as our Nvidia workforce data shows.

Software Engineer Layoffs vs Other Tech Role Cuts

• Across the 122,549 total 2025 tech layoffs, the largest share of role-typed cuts hit non-technical functions, including HR, communications, and recruiting.
• Within engineering-specific cuts, the four most-affected roles per analyst rollups are software engineers and developers, QA engineers, product managers, and project managers.
• Salesforce’s headline 2025 round affected customer support, not engineering, leaving its core dev workforce intact even as the company stopped hiring new engineers.
• Microsoft’s May 2025 round skewed toward software engineers, an exception to the broader 2025 pattern of non-engineering cuts dominating.
• Recruiting and talent functions absorbed disproportionate cuts at multiple firms, reflecting the shift from growth-mode hiring to maintenance-mode workforce planning.
• UX designers and product managers tracked closer to engineer cut rates than to recruiter or HR cut rates in 2025 layoff announcements.
• Sales roles were comparatively protected at Big Tech firms in 2025, except for the Salesforce support reorg.

Source: Crunchbase News role analysis, Fortune coverage of company-level rounds, individual company memos

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Software developers aged 22 to 25 absorbed a roughly 20% employment decline from their late 2022 peak by mid-2025, while workers aged 30 and over in the same AI-exposed category saw employment grow 6% to 12%, per Stanford Digital Economy Lab analysis. That single asymmetry pulls the layoff narrative away from “general engineering collapse” toward a tighter story: cuts concentrated at the junior level and across management layers, with mid-career and senior engineers holding ground or even gaining share where AI specialization is involved.

The companies driving the headline numbers, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce, each had their own stated reasons, ranging from “culture” to performance management to explicit AI substitution. The data points beneath those statements are consistent: software development job postings remain 36.4% below February 2020 levels per Indeed Hiring Lab, and hiring has frozen at firms like Salesforce. Meanwhile, the AI-skill premium has widened to 43% for engineers with multiple AI specialisations, per Acceler8 Talent data. Mid-career engineers with AI fluency benefit most from the divergence, while early-career entrants face the steepest entry barrier in over a decade.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics still projects 15% software developer employment growth through 2034. If the historical pattern holds, the recovery will favor specialists, redeployers, and engineers who pair traditional software craft with AI tooling fluency.