Amazon & Walmart among America’s biggest companies that earned $2.1 trillion last year, employing fewer people than ever
Every headline on this year’s Fortune 500 list points in the same direction: revenue, profit and market cap are all breaking records. But barring a recession for the first time since 1995, when the list began including service firms, companies on the list collectively employed fewer people than the previous year and cut 301,049 jobs even as profits rose.
Galaxy Digital, Bitgo Holdings: Fortune 500’s smallest staff
Nowhere is the change clearer than at the bottom of the headcount and at the top of the rankings.
Galaxy Digital, a New York-based digital asset company, entered the Fortune 100 list this year at number 76 with a staff of only 700; this was a fraction of what other companies at this level carried; The second smallest employer in the top 100 has almost eight times as many people on its payroll.
Further down the list, Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Bitgo Holdings came in at No. 278 with just 603 employees.
Between them, the two companies are now among the largest in America by revenue and employ more than 1,300 people combined; perhaps a glimpse of what a Fortune 500 company might look like when headcount ceases to be a measure of scale.
Fortune 500 headcount 2026: why it dropped
The headline number for 2026 is stark: Total employment in the Fortune 500 falls to 30.5 million, with a loss of 301,049 jobs; Yet combined revenue rose 5 percent to a record $21 trillion, and profits rose 12 percent to $2.1 trillion.
Its market value increased by 19 percent to $55 trillion, largely driven by spending on and interest in artificial intelligence. However, most of the decline in headcount was not due to layoffs at companies that remained on the list. Which picked up where companies left off.
Walgreens Boots Alliance, one of the 25 largest employers with 252,500 employees in last year’s ranking, left the list in August 2025 after being privatized by buyout firm Sycamore Partners.
Nordstrom, with its 41,000 employees, left the company in a similar take-private deal. The total workforce of the 22 companies that fell off the list this year reached 659,640 people.
Fortune 500 new entrants: half the workforce
The 22 companies that took its place could not come close to filling this gap. Together they employed 317,414 people; this was less than half the workforce of the firms they replaced.
Amentum Holdings, a Virginia-based engineering and technology services company, was the largest of the newcomers with 50,000 employees, followed by Illinois healthcare supply company Medline with 45,000 employees.
Fortune 500 hiring 2026: steady despite record profit
Even among companies on both the 2025 and 2026 lists, there was virtually no change in hiring. In total, only 41,177 new jobs were added; That’s an increase of just 0.1 percent among tens of millions of current workers.
Harvard University economics professor Lawrence Katz summarized this model as a “low-hiring, low-fire economy.”
A handful of companies have broken from this pattern in both directions. Dick’s Sporting Goods added 31,050 employees, increasing its workforce by 83.1 percent after acquiring Foot Locker in September, while Carvana, which has rebounded from a 99 percent collapse in its share price, added 5,700 employees, up 32.8 percent.
The picture was similarly muted at the top of the list: Amazon added 20,000 workers, up 1.3 percent; Walmart’s headcount remained steady; and UnitedHealth Group cut 10,000 jobs, down 2.5 percent.
Retail remained the list’s largest employer by sector, with just over 7 million workers, but it lost 0.9 percent of its workforce.
While technology, the second largest sector with 3.8 million employees, cut 1 percent, the finance sector, the third largest sector with 3.5 million employees, was the only major sector to add staff, with an increase of 0.9 percent.
Revenue per employee: Fortune 500 record
Katz attributed the gap between corporate performance and hiring to a longer shift in the way the largest companies are managed. “These factors mean that sales and value added are growing dramatically more than employment for the largest firms,” he said, pointing to a pattern in which large companies concentrate hiring among “professional, talented people who are dramatically rewarded but who do not share the big productivity gains with this broader workforce, as in older, mostly unionized manufacturing companies and even old-style banks.” [once did]”
The numbers support this reading. In the Fortune 500, revenue per employee currently stands at $687,094 and profits per employee at $68,743; While both reached record levels, inflation-adjusted wages remained virtually unchanged over the same period.
Artificial intelligence and jobs: Harvard economist’s warning
Katz expects artificial intelligence to push this distinction even further, but he couldn’t predict exactly how.
“We’re seeing a rise in new business ventures, we’re seeing the development of smaller-scale businesses, some of which may eventually become very large, but perhaps they may not end up having as large an employment footprint as traditional firms, perhaps as they’re redesigned to focus on AI agents as the main types of workers,” he said, noting that the broader impacts of AI adoption remain in their early stages.
