After laying off 15,000 employees in a year, Microsoft will now reportedly pay yet more employees to quit voluntarily in historic first

Microsoft still isn't done with its workforce reductions, though this time it's apparently offering a friendlier way out for long-serving employees. The company is reportedly set to begin offering buyouts to a selection of employees in the US, essentially offering to pay them to retire early. This would be the first time in the company's 51-year history that a buyout option has been offered.

About 7% of Microsoft's US workforce would be eligible for the buyout, according to a report from CNBC. The program only applies to employees whose age and years of employment combine to 70 or higher, so it's clearly targeted at the company's longest-serving workers – those who may already be considering retirement anyway.

The report doesn't explain the exact terms of the buyouts, but these sorts of things typically involve the incentive of, say, several months of extra salary in exchange for your early retirement. In other words, it's a sort of soft layoff, but one that at least offers some flexibility to the workforce the company's trying to cut down on.

Microsoft's last official employee count was in June 2025, when the company numbered 228,000 workers, of which 125,000 worked in the US. 7% of that workforce, then, would cover just shy of 9,000 employees, though obviously it's likely not all of them will want to take the buyout.

In May 2025, Microsoft announced 6,000 layoffs, with a further 9,000 jobs cut in July. The latter reduction had a massive impact at Xbox, including the cancellation of Rare's Everwild and the Perfect Dark reboot, as well as ending development of an unannounced ZeniMax Online MMO. As well as, you know, all the developers who lost their jobs.

The question now is whether these voluntary buyouts will be sufficient for whatever payroll reduction Microsoft is now looking to achieve. Hopefully, this just means a number of long-tenured Microsoft veterans will be able to enjoy an early retirement with some extra cash in their pockets, but it could equally be a harbinger of further cost-cutting measures and, yes, more layoffs.

Time will tell what's going to happen at Microsoft as a whole, but there's plenty of upheaval at the gaming division right now. Microsoft Gaming, as it was officially known, is now going back to being merely branded Xbox, as CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty acknowledge that fans are frustrated over the state of the brand. Now, the company's putting its focus squarely on "daily active players" as it takes steps to "reevaluate" its approach to exclusive games and AI. Hopefully it won't have to reevaluate too many of the people it's hired along the way.

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