Microsoft Voluntary Exit Offer Pays 60,000 Staff the Same as a Layoff

The email arrived on the morning of 26 October without the context that would have told its reader what it meant. One employee in Hyderabad opened his work inbox, saw the Voluntary Exit Offer message, and thought his time at Microsoft had come to an end. He wrote on Reddit that he later realised his whole organisation had received the same email. “I realized that my entire org had received the email and it was not related to my performance,” he wrote.

Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, had published the message on the company’s official blog the same day. She called the Microsoft Voluntary Exit Offer a new choice for employees who might be considering a future outside the company, and another way for participating organisations to adapt their workforce to changing needs. The memo contains no number of eligible employees, no payment figure, no deadline, no list of participating teams and no mention of visas. Eligible employees were told they would receive an email with a link to their own offer details within a few hours.

The memo names no figure. About 60,000 eligible staff, roughly 27 percent of the 223,000 full-time employees Microsoft reported at the end of June, came from the company speaking to GeekWire and other outlets, not from the memo. The deadline, the first week of December, with exits on 31 December, came from a person familiar with the plan speaking to CNBC.

The Hyderabad thread filled within hours with people doing the same calculation in public. The replies that followed were mostly advice to line up another job first, in a market the posters described as brutal, and to treat the payout as a cushion rather than a windfall. A 23-year-old software development engineer wrote that he had been offered three months’ salary. “I’ve been offered my 3 months salary for quitting it. Should I take it?” he asked.

Whether a person even received an email depended on a decision their manager had already made. Coleman wrote that some organisations were providing the offer and some were not, with participation varying by each business’s priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs. People familiar with the plan told The Verge that AI experiences, Copilot, CoreAI, Windows and Devices, Xbox, finance and human resources were taking part in full. Cloud and AI, Microsoft AI and the corporate, external and legal affairs group were taking part in part. Marketing, the commercial business, discovery and quantum, and security were out, according to the same reporting, and Microsoft said its sales organisation was not participating. Some data-centre groups were also excluded, according to Bloomberg and Agence France-Presse reporting. Microsoft has not published a team list of its own, so the map employees are working from is assembled from reporting, not from the company.

The same parts of the company had already been cut through the year. Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs in July, about 2 percent of its global workforce, mostly in Xbox and commercial sales according to reporting, followed by hundreds more across the company in September. GeekWire reported more than 15,000 jobs cut in 2025. The June headcount of 223,000 was already down 5,000 on the year before, the first annual decline in a decade, and it predates the July cuts. By function, the filing behind that total put 89,000 people in operations, 77,000 in product research and development, 43,000 in sales and marketing and 14,000 in general and administration. Research and development had fallen from a peak of 81,000 in 2024. Coleman told GeekWire in July that Microsoft had redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles over the previous year, a figure the company has offered as the other side of the same workforce changes.

The individual email carries the money, in a formula Microsoft did not publish. Business Insider reviewed offer documents and reported that the United States terms match Microsoft’s standard severance. Employees at level 64 and below are offered one week of base pay for every six months of service. Employees at levels 65 to 67 are offered two weeks for every six months, capped at 39 weeks of base pay for level 67 and below. Employees at level 68 are offered 12 months’ salary under the standard package. For employees at level 67 and below, the package also includes continued stock vesting for six or 12 months depending on tenure, healthcare for a fixed period and career transition services. Microsoft told The Register it does not classify the deal as a buyout, because no one is being incentivised to leave. On those formulas, an employee at level 64 or below with five years of service would be offered 10 weeks of base pay, and one with 10 years would be offered 20 weeks. An employee at levels 65 to 67 with 10 years would reach 40 weeks before the cap pulled the offer back to 39.

Employees in India were offered different terms. Business Standard, citing the company, reported one month of base salary for each completed year of service, plus health insurance and career transition services, with a decision deadline of 1 December for staff in India. Microsoft employs about 23,000 people in India and has not said how many of them are eligible. The Hyderabad poster’s three months of pay fits three completed years on that formula, and a Blind poster who described almost 10 years at the company and a return from parental leave at the end of November described a package of roughly 10 months. That poster, writing under an anonymous handle on Blind, weighed the money against a second child planned for early next year. “No benefits, no parental leave and no guarantee I’ll find something comparable in this market,” the poster wrote. The October package leaves out the extended healthcare that GeekWire said was a major draw of the spring retirement programme.

Microsoft ran that spring programme first, and its result is the only real guide to how many people might take this one. The Voluntary Retirement Program, announced in April, was limited to United States employees at senior director level and below whose age plus years of service reached at least 70. About 8,750 people were eligible and more than 30 percent accepted, Coleman told GeekWire in July, adding that the result reduced the size of the layoffs announced that month. Microsoft disclosed a 900 million dollar charge for the retirement programme in its April earnings report.

For the October offer, the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share accepting, and a spokesperson pointed to uptake of 3 to 5 percent at comparable programmes in comments reported by Fortune, and 5 to 6 percent in comments reported by KIRO 7. At 3 to 6 percent of 60,000, the arithmetic gives 1,800 to 3,600 departures, against 4,800 jobs cut in July. Microsoft gave no projection of its own. Eligibility is not a departure count. That expectation sits beside a thread in which posters call the market brutal and measure the offer in months of pay. The company also said the offer is not a replacement for layoffs, which remain part of its approach depending on business conditions.

The Labor Department acted 18 days before Coleman’s memo. On 8 October, the United States Department of Labor suspended Microsoft and seven other employers, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, from the PERM programme, the labour certification step that starts most employment-based green card cases. The department said it would not accept new applications from the eight companies or process pending ones while federal investigations continue. Immigration lawyers cite the regulation behind the tool, 20 CFR 656.31(b), under which a first suspension can run up to 180 days and can be extended while an investigation or court proceedings run. As of 30 October, the department had published no news release, announcement or Federal Register notice about the action, according to a check by Ashoori Law.

Vice President JD Vance said at the press conference that Microsoft had laid off 6,000 American workers in the past year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. Microsoft responded the same day that about 80 percent of its H-1B filings were extensions or status changes for people who already worked there, not new arrivals. Workers approaching the six-year limit on an H-1B visa cannot extend it without an approved PERM, according to Gartner. The memo says nothing about visas. Microsoft has not said whether H-1B holders qualify for the offer or what immigration help follows it. A commenter on Blind, tagged as working at Google rather than Microsoft, put the tension in one line. “How can they be paying people to leave yet claim there’s a labor shortage?” the commenter wrote.

Microsoft reported its September-quarter results two days after the memo. Revenue for the quarter ended 30 September was 92.3 billion dollars, up 19 percent, operating income was 45.9 billion dollars, up 21 percent, and net income was 36.6 billion dollars. Microsoft Cloud revenue reached 63.9 billion dollars, up 30 percent, Azure revenue grew 48 percent, and commercial remaining performance obligation, contracted revenue not yet recognised, rose 73 percent to 677 billion dollars. The earnings release contains no mention of the Voluntary Exit Offer and no estimate of what it will cost. On the earnings call, capital expenditures including finance leases for the quarter were reported at 45.2 billion dollars, up from 34.9 billion a year earlier and below the above-50-billion-dollar figure Microsoft had guided in July, with spending above 50 billion dollars expected in the following quarter. Xbox content and services revenue fell 2 percent and Windows OEM and devices revenue fell 22 percent in the same quarter, the two product lines whose teams appear on both the July cuts and the exit-offer map.

Coleman closed the memo with a promise to keep providing clarity and to listen and learn. The offer, she wrote, was new for Microsoft, and the company would learn from it.