Uber Cuts About 10% of Its Workforce, Its Largest Layoffs Since 2020

Uber is eliminating about 10% of its jobs worldwide, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in an internal memo on September 2, 2026, that the company also published on its own newsroom site under the title “Building a simpler, faster Uber.” It’s the ride-hailing and delivery giant’s largest round of cuts since the pandemic-era layoffs of 2020.

Key facts

Announcement: CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees on September 2, 2026 that Uber is cutting about 10% of its jobs worldwide.
Headcount: Uber’s memo describes the reduction as about 10% of staff and gives no headcount; Bloomberg News and other outlets put the cut at roughly 3,300 employees.
Scale: Uber’s largest round of layoffs since the pandemic-era cuts of 2020, when it cut thousands of jobs across two rounds in May.
Remote work: Fully remote work is being capped at about 1% of staff; most remote employees must relocate near an office and work in person roughly three days a week.
Financial backdrop: The cuts follow strong Q2 2026 results — revenue up about 12% year over year to roughly $14.19 billion, net income about $2.39 billion.
Stock reaction: Shares rose modestly on announcement day; different reports put the gain anywhere from about 1.6% to 2.4%.

Uber’s memo describes the reduction as “about 10%” of staff and does not give a headcount number. Bloomberg News, which first reported the memo, and a wide range of outlets that followed put the figure at roughly 3,300 employees — a number that comes from that reporting, not from a statement Uber itself has made public.

Why the company says it’s doing this

Khosrowshahi’s memo frames the cuts as a response to Uber’s own growth, not to weak business. Years of expansion, he wrote, had produced “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership” — and the changes are meant to make the company “simpler and faster” with “more capacity to invest in our future.” The timing supports that framing: the cuts come less than a month after Uber reported strong second-quarter 2026 results, with revenue up about 12% year over year to roughly $14.19 billion and net income of about $2.39 billion, up from about $1.35 billion a year earlier.

That’s a useful check for readers who assume layoffs always mean a company is struggling. Here, the available results show the cuts came amid a strong quarter, while Uber describes them as a restructuring rather than a response to weak earnings.

What’s actually changing inside Uber

The memo describes a flattening of the company’s structure rather than cuts to any single department:

The number of managers will fall by about 20%, with some shifting into individual-contributor roles rather than leaving the company.
“Micro-teams” — groups of just one or two people — will be cut by roughly half.
The share of employees sitting more than seven layers below the CEO will drop by 20%.
Uber’s Restaurants, Retail and Direct (white-label) delivery teams are being folded into one structure, organized at global, regional and local levels.
Core Services Engineering and Science teams are being merged.

Uber is sharply limiting fully remote work

Alongside the layoffs, Uber is capping fully remote work at about 1% of its workforce. Most employees who currently work remotely will be expected to relocate within commuting distance of a company office and to work in person roughly three days a week, with New York and San Francisco named as the company’s main global hubs. For anyone at Uber working remotely today, that is the most concrete near-term change.

Not the AI story some coverage suggests

Much of the coverage around this announcement has connected it to Uber’s separate push into robotaxis, where the company has previously made a multibillion-dollar commitment to autonomous-vehicle partnerships — including a deal with Rivian worth up to $1.25 billion through 2031 for as many as 50,000 self-driving vehicles. That robotaxi spending is real, but it was announced months earlier, around April 2026, and Uber’s own memo about the September cuts does not mention robotaxis, autonomous vehicles or any dollar figure at all. Tying the two together as if the layoffs fund a specific robotaxi commitment goes beyond what Uber has said.

The memo similarly does not blame artificial intelligence. Khosrowshahi’s stated reasoning is organizational — reducing management layers and overlapping ownership — not AI-driven efficiency, which is how some other tech companies have described their 2026 layoffs. That distinction matters here because Uber itself already made an AI-cited cut this year: around July 22-23, 2026, it reduced its customer-service organization by about 10%, widely reported as roughly 900 people, specifically citing increased use of AI. At least one outlet said Uber had not publicly confirmed that specific headcount. The September cuts are described differently by the company, even though both happened in the same year.

What’s confirmed, and what isn’t

Uber has confirmed the roughly 10% workforce reduction, the organizational changes above, and the new remote-work policy. Per Uber’s own memo, everyone whose role was affected had already been notified by the time it was published, except in countries where the company says it must follow a required local process first. Left unanswered as of September 2: which countries or offices will lose the most positions, what severance Uber is offering the affected employees, and whether this September count includes or is separate from two earlier 2026 actions — a roughly 23% cut to Uber’s HR-focused “People” division around June 3, and the July customer-service reduction. No source, including Uber’s own memo, spells out that relationship.

Uber says the savings will go toward driver, courier and merchant support, upgrades to its ride-sharing and delivery businesses, and its broader autonomous-vehicle strategy.

Who isn’t affected

Uber drivers and couriers are independent contractors, not employees, and reporting on the cuts consistently describes them as affecting corporate and office staff — management, engineering support and delivery-operations roles — rather than the people driving cars or making deliveries.

The numbers that don’t quite add up

Uber’s most recent annual report put its global headcount at about 34,000 at the end of 2025. Subtract the reported 3,300-job cut from that figure and the math comes to roughly 30,700 — not the below-30,000 total that several outlets report for where headcount lands after the cuts. That gap goes unexplained in the sources reviewed for this article.

Uber’s stock rose modestly on announcement day, though published accounts of the size of the move differ: about 1.6% in midday trading, roughly 1.7% premarket, and about 2.4% by market close. The stock was still down about 8% for 2026 overall at that point.

Uber has not said whether more cuts are coming this year.