Netflix Plans to Cut About 5% of Staff as Soon as Next Week, Puck Reports

NFLX is planning to cut about 5% of its workforce, with an announcement that could come as early as next week, Puck reported on Friday, October 9, citing unnamed sources. Reuters and Bloomberg both carried the report. Netflix declined to comment, so the size and timing come from the press report rather than from the company.

The scale is easier to read against the headcount. Netflix had about 16,000 full-time employees at the end of 2025, 68% of them in the United States, according to its regulatory filing. A 5% reduction applied to that base works out to roughly 800 roles. None of the reports so far names the teams affected or gives a reason for the cuts. The last large round came in 2022, when Netflix cut hundreds of jobs as growth slowed and it lost subscribers.

This time the backdrop is competitive rather than a subscriber decline. Reuters notes that media companies are consolidating and that YouTube is taking a growing share of viewing and ad spend, while Netflix pushes into advertising, live programming and games. Those are newer lines of business, and a restructuring would show where management wants headcount to sit among them.

The next checkpoint is the Q3 2026 report, which our earnings calendar has on Tuesday, October 20 (estimated, not yet confirmed by the company), with consensus EPS of $0.82. Investors will be listening for whether management confirms the cuts, quantifies any restructuring charge, and ties the savings to its advertising and live-programming plans.