Netflix is preparing to cut about 5% of its global staff, a reduction of roughly 800 people, according to a report by the entertainment publication Puck that Reuters later matched with people familiar with the plans. An internal announcement could come as early as next week.
The cuts would fall heaviest on the teams that make and license its programming, with creative and film groups among those affected, according to people familiar with the matter. Netflix declined to comment, and the plan has not been finalized.
The scale would make this the company’s largest round of layoffs since 2022, when Netflix eliminated about 450 positions after reporting its first quarterly subscriber decline in more than a decade, a loss of 200,000 customers in the first quarter of that year. The circumstances this time could hardly be more different.
Netflix is not shrinking. It finished 2025 with about 16,000 full-time employees, and roughly 10,900 of them, about 68%, work in the United States and Canada. The company reports third-quarter results on October 20, and it has told investors to expect a full-year operating margin of 31.5%, a level that implies healthy profits rather than distress.
That is the puzzle at the center of the move. In 2022 the job cuts followed a subscriber exodus and a stock that lost much of its value in a matter of months. This time the reductions are being planned while revenue and profit are both rising. The message inside the company, people familiar with the matter said, is that Netflix wants to redirect spending from the people who commission shows toward the businesses it now considers its next engines.
Those engines are newer and less proven than the streaming service that made Netflix. The company has spent heavily on live programming, from sports to one-off events, and on advertising, which requires a different workforce from the one that builds prestige drama. Video games, another of its bets, have yet to produce a breakout hit.
The co-chief executives, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, have signaled that the company is not growing as fast as it would like. Engagement, the metric Netflix obsesses over, rose only about 2% in the first half of 2026, according to Puck, and the stock has slid through the year. A company that trades on growth can find itself cutting costs even while its profits expand.
The comparisons to 2022 are instructive, because the two moments run in opposite directions. That year Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, its first decline in more than a decade, and the cuts that followed were a response to a business in retreat. Today’s plan, if it proceeds, would be a choice made from strength.
Netflix has spent the past few years adding businesses that look little like the subscription service that built it. It launched an advertising-supported tier in late 2022 and has since pushed into live events, striking deals for NFL games on Christmas Day and weekly wrestling programming. Each of those efforts demands engineers, ad salespeople and live-production staff, and each competes for budget against the scripted television that once defined the brand.
Layoffs at a profitable company are a statement about priorities, not survival. Netflix has long described a lean culture that pays well and expects a great deal, and it has removed people it considers less essential even in good years.
The timing, days before an earnings report, gives the move a particular edge. Announcing job cuts just ahead of results is a signal to Wall Street that the company is serious about protecting its margin target, even if it unsettles the people who make the shows.
The company has also absorbed a setback in its efforts to expand through acquisition. Netflix was reported to have pursued Warner Bros. Discovery assets, a bid that did not come together, leaving the company to grow by building rather than buying. That path rewards discipline, and discipline often shows up first as a smaller payroll.
For a company that still spends heavily on content, the arithmetic of the cuts is modest. Netflix has told investors to expect a 31.5% operating margin for the full year, and trimming payroll by a few hundred people is one of the faster ways to defend that number when engagement is rising only slowly. What the layoffs cannot do is make the new businesses grow any faster.
The cutbacks also arrive as Hollywood is already contracting. Studios and streamers have trimmed staff through 2025 and 2026 as the industry adjusts to a business that no longer grows the way it did during the streaming boom, and each round makes the next one easier for rivals to copy.
The plan is still a plan. People familiar with the matter said the size and scope could change before anything is announced. If it lands as described, Netflix will enter its next earnings call having told investors it is more profitable than ever, and having told about 800 of its employees they are not part of that future.
