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By Suzanne Blake
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Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees, which could reshape more than a quarter of its global workforce.
The tech giant, already at the center of the Trump administration's crackdown on employment-based immigration, confirmed Monday that eligible employees in the United States, Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive voluntary exit offers.
Workers across areas including AI experiences, Copilot, finance, human resources, Xbox and Windows + Devices are eligible, while other divisions are excluded.
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“The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we’re evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter,” the company note from Microsoft’s chief people officer, Amy Coleman, reads. “This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support.”
The announcement does not mean 60,000 workers are being laid off: They are just now eligible to accept packages similar to Microsoft's standard severance.
The timing of the buyout offer arrives after the Trump administration suspended Microsoft and seven other technology and consulting companies from the Labor Department's Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM, program.
This program enables employers to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residence.
Why It Matters
Microsoft is one of the country's biggest users of the H-1B program, making its hiring practices particularly relevant as the Trump administration seeks to overhaul employment-based immigration.
Data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services showed Microsoft received 6,258 H-1B approvals in fiscal 2025, making it the third-largest sponsor identified in the report, behind Amazon and Meta.
Earlier this month, Microsoft said that approximately 6,000 H-1B petitions it submitted in the last fiscal year were overwhelmingly connected to workers already at the company.
The tech giant added that 80 percent were applications to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than hire new people. It also said the remaining new-employee filings were for people already legally inside the United States and amounted to only about 1 percent of its U.S. workforce.
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Microsoft Buyout: What We Know
Microsoft had 223,000 full-time employees worldwide as of June 30, meaning the roughly 60,000 people eligible for the buyback program could make up more than a quarter of its global workforce.
According to TechCrunch, the terms will be similar to the company's standard severance package. Eligible workers are at the vice president level and below on selected teams.
“The startling part of this development isn't necessarily just that buyouts were offered, as Microsoft has done this before, but rather the sheer amount,” Alex Beene, financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek.
“60,000 positions is a sizable chunk of Microsoft's overall global workforce, and the fear, obviously, is if this is in relation to a larger trend of how AI is leading to increased spending that must be funded through a reduced employee count.”
Newsweek reached out to Microsoft for comment via email.
Now that the buyback offers are available, employees have until the first week of December to decide whether to accept.
The new program follows other layoffs this year. Microsoft announced 4,800 job cuts in July, equivalent to roughly 2.1 percent of its global workforce, and also offered voluntary departures to around 9,000 U.S. employees.
“I find it disheartening that Microsoft, a company worth trillions of dollars in market capitalization, is willing to reduce headcount all in the name of profit,” Kevin Thompson, CEO of 9i Capital Group and host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek. “We can call it efficiency or whatever you want, but ultimately, this comes down to the company's ability to squeeze out more profit and keep shareholders happy.”
How Microsoft Buyout, Layoffs Impact H-1B Visas
The newest buyout program follows an unusually public clash between Microsoft and the Trump administration over foreign workers. On October 8, the Labor Department announced that Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL would be suspended from the PERM program. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said Microsoft and Adobe were suspended because of "multiple active federal investigations."
“Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visas approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications. That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers,” Sonderling said at the time.
The PERM action does not prevent Microsoft from using the H-1B program. H-1Bs are temporary work visas, while PERM labor certification is associated with the employment-based green-card process.
Vice President JD Vance nevertheless singled out Microsoft when announcing the crackdown, arguing that its foreign-worker hiring was at odds with its previous layoffs.
Vance claimed Microsoft had "replaced" thousands of workers laid off in 2025 with people on H-1B visas.
However, CNBC's analysis found that roughly two-thirds of Microsoft's H-1B approvals covered people already working at the company, while Microsoft's own figures say 80 percent of its approximately 6,000 petitions in the last fiscal year were extensions or status changes for existing employees.
Microsoft has previously pushed back against the administration's characterization.
"The vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans," the company said in an October 8 statement. Microsoft also said it pays H-1B workers the same as employees performing comparable work and that its H-1B wages are among the highest in the sector.
What Is Microsoft's Voluntary Exit Offer?
The buyout applies across participating organizations in four countries. Through the voluntary exit offer, eligible workers can leave with severance as the company looks to reshape its workforce. It remains unclear how many will accept the offer.
Some question the move to push employees out after Big Tech’s larger reliance on artificial intelligence and the disruption hitting its workforce as a result.
“Microsoft is spending billions betting on AI while offering a quarter of its workforce an exit. Workers helped build and grow one of the most valuable companies in the world and now they're being treated like an expense standing in the way of the next big investment. And this is a fundamental problem with how America treats workers,” HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek.
“We don't recognize a societal obligation to ensure people have an income. Instead, we impose an individual mandate to go out and earn one, then leave people at the mercy of corporations that can eliminate their livelihoods whenever it benefits the company's bottom line.”
On the government front, the Trump administration has also sought a $100,000 additional payment for certain new H-1B petitions involving beneficiaries who need to enter the United States, but that policy has become tied up in federal litigation.
A July federal appeals court order kept a lower court ruling that blocks collection of the fee in place while litigation continues. Trump subsequently extended the underlying proclamation through September 21, 2027.
How Many Employees Does Microsoft Have?
Microsoft employed approximately 223,000 people worldwide as of June 30, including 121,000 in the United States.
Microsoft President Brad Smith previously criticized restrictions on employment-based immigration earlier this month, arguing that immigrants have played an important role in developing the U.S. technology industry.
Speaking after the administration's PERM action, Smith cited the contribution of immigrant technology executives and warned: "Let's not put that at risk."
Smith also rejected Vance's characterization of Microsoft's immigration practices, calling it "completely off base.”
“We will stand by our record,” Smith said. “And I hope that folks at the White House might look again and look at what we think is a more accurate picture.”
What Happens Next
The significance of Microsoft's buyout will partly depend on how many of the roughly 60,000 eligible employees take the offer.
Beyond the immigration employment issues, this could reflect a larger reality of Big Tech replacing employees with AI, Beene said. “While most of the concern on an employee's end is losing their job because AI could do it better, the actual short-term threat is their role being eliminated due to the substantial costs involved in investing in AI, from data centers to technological advancement of these new platforms.”
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Kate Nalepinski and Edward T. Cummins
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