An Inquirer analysis of five years of state layoff notices finds that the nine-county region accounts for nearly 39 percent of the workers California employers have reported cutting in 2026, its largest share since the tech retrenchment of 2023.
By Staff Reporter
For most of California, the flow of formal layoff warnings has slowed this year. In the Bay Area, it has picked up.
From Jan. 1 through Oct. 14, employers filed notices with the state covering 22,920 workers in the nine Bay Area counties, according to an Inquirer analysis of records published by the California Employment Development Department. That is 13 percent more than in the same period of 2025, when notices covered 20,214 Bay Area workers.
Over the same span, notices statewide fell by a quarter, to 59,298 workers from 79,639. Much of that decline reflects a single unusual filing last year, but even after setting it aside, layoff notices across California were down about 7 percent, while those in the Bay Area rose.
The result is that the region, home to roughly a fifth of the state’s population, accounts for 38.7 percent of the workers named in California layoff notices so far this year. That is up from 25.4 percent in 2025, and it is the largest share for the period since 2023, at the height of the technology industry’s retrenchment after its pandemic hiring boom.
The notices, required under the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, are the most detailed public record of large job cuts in California. They show a pattern that national unemployment figures and company earnings reports can obscure: several of the region’s largest employers, many of them profitable, are cutting jobs in large blocks while redirecting spending toward artificial intelligence.
What the records show
The Inquirer compiled every notice in the department’s annual reports for the fiscal years beginning July 2021 through June 2026, and in its current report, which covers notices processed from July 1 through Oct. 14, 2026. Each record lists the employer, county, number of affected workers, the date the state received the notice and the date the layoff or closure takes effect. To compare years fairly, the analysis counts notices received from Jan. 1 through Oct. 14 of each year.
By that measure, Bay Area notices covered 10,094 workers in 2022, 27,730 in 2023, 29,580 in 2024, 20,214 in 2025 and 22,920 in 2026. The region’s share of the statewide total went from 30.8 percent in 2022 to 40.4 percent in 2023, 38.1 percent in 2024, 25.4 percent in 2025 and 38.7 percent this year.
The statewide figure for 2025 is inflated by one filing: a May 2025 notice from Tend Exchange Subsidiary L.L.C. and Delaware Tender Staffing, listing 16,132 workers at an address in Los Angeles. Without it, California notices fell to 59,298 workers this year from 63,507, a decline of 6.6 percent. Outside Los Angeles County and the Bay Area, the total fell to 25,005 from 29,215, a drop of 14 percent.
The Bay Area’s notices this year are also larger. Employers filed 334 notices covering Bay Area sites through Oct. 14, compared with 461 in the same period last year, but the average notice covered about 69 workers, up from 44.
The increase is concentrated on the Peninsula. Notices in San Mateo County covered 5,675 workers, more than double the 2,555 in the same period of 2025. San Francisco County notices rose to 4,602 from 4,069. Santa Clara County was essentially unchanged at 6,899, and Alameda County fell to 3,395 from 3,967.
The technology companies return
The clearest change is in who is filing. The Inquirer classified the notices filed by about 60 large technology, internet, semiconductor, electric-vehicle and digital-payments companies. Those employers accounted for 11,125 of the Bay Area workers named in notices this year, or 48.5 percent of the total. In the same period of 2025, they accounted for 4,524 workers, or 22.4 percent. In 2023, at the height of the post-pandemic retrenchment, the share was 39.2 percent.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is by far the largest filer. Its 14 Bay Area notices this year cover 3,715 workers, including a single May notice for 2,212 people at its Menlo Park headquarters at 1 Hacker Way. That notice alone is the largest Bay Area filing of the year. Meta said in April that it would cut about 10 percent of its work force, or roughly 8,000 people, and a company spokesperson, Erica Sackin, confirmed to NPR in May that affected employees had been notified. NPR described the cuts as part of a reorganization meant to “accelerate a pivot toward artificial intelligence.”
Oracle has filed notices covering 1,093 Bay Area workers this year, in two rounds: 652 at its Redwood City, Pleasanton and Santa Clara campuses in April, and 441 at the same three sites in September. Amazon’s notices cover 917 Bay Area workers, most of them in Santa Clara County. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, filed for 585, Intuit for 543, Cisco Systems for 471 and eBay for 469. Uber’s notices cover 463 workers in San Francisco, Sunnyvale and among its remote California staff.
Some employers have tied their cuts directly to artificial intelligence. In a memo to employees after Visa filed notice of 320 layoffs at its Foster City campus, the chief executive, Ryan McInerney, wrote that “AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle. The company had reported $5.6 billion in net income for its fiscal third quarter, the Chronicle noted.
Uber’s July notice listed customer-service and community-operations roles, including 13 service-team analysts, TheStreet reported, describing the cuts as part of a restructuring to “reportedly rely more on artificial intelligence.” Uber did not respond to TheStreet’s request for comment. A later Uber filing, received in September, covered 390 more workers in San Francisco and Sunnyvale.
Not every large filing reflects a company shrinking. The second-largest Bay Area notice this year, from Covenant Aviation Security, covers 1,279 screeners and other workers at San Francisco International Airport, where the company’s contract with the Transportation Security Administration ends Nov. 30. A new contractor, VMD Corp., is to take over on Dec. 1, and the airport’s worker-retention policy requires it to keep existing employees for a 90-day trial period, Aviation Pros reported. The notice lists the work site under San Francisco County, which owns the airport. Excluding it, Bay Area notices this year still total 21,641 workers, 7 percent more than in the same period of 2025.
Manufacturing cuts appear as well. LeeMAH Electronics, a Brisbane manufacturer, filed three closure notices for 479 workers, and Jabil filed notice of a temporary closure affecting 382 workers in San Jose.
What is not in the data
The notices are an incomplete measure, and they describe planned actions rather than completed ones. California’s law applies to “covered establishments” that have employed 75 or more people in the prior 12 months, and it is triggered by layoffs of 50 or more workers at a single site within 30 days, closures and relocations, under Section 1400 of the Labor Code. Cuts at smaller companies, and cuts spread thinly across many sites, often never appear. Under federal rules cited in the department’s guidance, contract workers who are paid by another employer are not counted when a company lays off its own staff.
The numbers also lag announcements. Netflix said on Oct. 14 that it would lay off about 1,000 employees worldwide, according to a memo reported by CNBC, but no notice for its Los Gatos headquarters appears in the state’s report through Oct. 14. The only Netflix notice this year covers 59 workers in Los Angeles. The company has not said how many of the affected employees are in California.
Some notices are revised or rescinded, and some companies relocate a portion of affected workers. A notice is not proof that every listed worker loses a job, and the Inquirer’s counts treat each notice as filed.
The Inquirer’s classification of technology companies is its own, based on employer names in the records. The analysis uses the date the department received each notice, as listed in the annual reports, and the processed date listed in the current report. Small differences in those definitions mean totals may differ slightly from other tallies.
A labor market that is not collapsing
The layoff notices do not by themselves signal a regional recession. Statewide, California’s unemployment rate held at 5.1 percent in September, and employers added 129,300 jobs over the previous year, according to the department’s monthly report. The number of people certifying for unemployment benefits during the September sample week was 310,167, down from 359,565 a year earlier.
The same report, however, shows signs of strain. The state lost 9,300 payroll jobs in September, and the separate household survey found 268,900 fewer employed Californians than a year earlier.
For the Bay Area, the concern is less the number of jobs than which jobs are being cut. The notices this year are heavy with product managers, engineers, analysts and support staff at companies that remain profitable. Netflix reported $3.66 billion in profit for its most recent quarter; Visa reported $5.6 billion for the quarter before its cuts were announced. Those are the jobs whose wages, bonuses and stock compensation feed California’s income-tax revenue, which depends unusually heavily on high earners.
The state’s response
A state law that took effect this year changed the notices, though not the thresholds. Senate Bill 617, which took effect Jan. 1, requires employers to state in their notices whether they will coordinate “rapid response” re-employment services with a local workforce board, to arrange those services within 30 days if they do, and to include information about CalFresh, the state’s food-assistance program, according to a department notice issued Jan. 6. The changes are meant to connect laid-off workers with help sooner; they do not require employers to give more warning or cover more companies.
Companies have generally described their cuts as a way to redirect resources rather than as a sign of weakness. “Our business is strong and growing,” Netflix’s co-chief executives, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, wrote in their memo, adding, “Doing that means making focused choices across the business.” Visa’s Mr. McInerney wrote that the company “must continue evolving how we work.”
What comes next
More notices are likely. Because California generally requires notice 60 days before a mass layoff, cuts announced this month would typically appear in the state’s reports well before they take effect. The department updates its report every Tuesday and Thursday.
Meta, the region’s largest source of layoff notices this year, reports quarterly results on Wednesday, along with Tesla and Lam Research, and investors will be listening for spending plans and hiring signals. The Inquirer will update its analysis as new filings arrive.
