Every headline number in this year’s Fortune 500 points in the same direction: revenue, profit and market value all hit records. Yet for the first time outside a recession since the list began including service firms in 1995, the companies on it collectively employed fewer people than the year before, shedding 301,049 jobs even as their profits surged.
Galaxy Digital, Bitgo Holdings: Fortune 500’s smallest staffs
Nowhere is the shift clearer than at the bottom of the employee count and the top of the rankings.
Galaxy Digital, a New York-based digital asset firm, broke into the Fortune 100 this year at number 76 with a staff of just 700, a fraction of what any other company in that tier carries; the next-smallest employer within the top 100 has nearly eight times as many people on payroll.
Further down the list, Bitgo Holdings, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, entered at number 278 with only 603 employees.
Between them, two companies now sit among America’s largest by revenue while employing barely more than 1,300 people combined, a glimpse, perhaps, of what a Fortune 500 firm can look like when headcount stops being the measure of scale.
Fortune 500 headcount 2026: why it fell
The headline figure for 2026 is stark: total employment across the Fortune 500 fell to 30.5 million, a drop of 301,049 jobs, even as combined revenue reached a record $21 trillion, up 5 per cent, and profit climbed 12 per cent to $2.1 trillion.
Market value rose 19 per cent to $55 trillion, propelled largely by spending on, and enthusiasm for, artificial intelligence. But most of the headcount decline did not come from layoffs inside companies that stayed on the list. It came from which companies left it.
Walgreens Boots Alliance, one of the 25 biggest employers on last year’s ranking with 252,500 staff, dropped off after being taken private by the buyout firm Sycamore Partners in August 2025.
Nordstrom, with 41,000 employees, exited through a similar take-private deal. Across all 22 companies that fell off the list this year, the combined workforce came to 659,640 people.
Fortune 500 newcomers: half the workforce
The 22 companies that took their place did not come close to filling that gap. Together they employed 317,414 people, 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 Medline, an Illinois healthcare supply business, with 45,000.
Fortune 500 hiring 2026: flat despite record profit
Even among the companies that appeared on both the 2025 and 2026 lists, hiring barely moved. Combined, they added only 41,177 jobs, a rise of just 0.1 per cent across tens of millions of existing workers.
Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University, summed up the pattern as a “low-hire, low-fire economy.”
A handful of firms broke from that pattern in either direction. Dick’s Sporting Goods grew its workforce by 83.1 per cent, adding 31,050 employees after buying Foot Locker in September, while Carvana, recovering from a 99 per cent collapse in its share price, added 5,700 staff, a 32.8 per cent rise.
At the very top of the list, the picture was similarly muted: Amazon added 20,000 employees, a 1.3 per cent increase; Walmart’s headcount held flat; and UnitedHealth Group cut 10,000 jobs, down 2.5 per cent.
Retailing remained the list’s largest employer by sector, with just over 7 million workers, though it shed 0.9 per cent of that workforce.
Technology, the second-largest sector at 3.8 million employees, cut 1 per cent, while financials, the third-largest at 3.5 million, was the only major sector to add staff, growing 0.9 per cent.
Revenue per employee: a Fortune 500 record
Katz linked the gap between corporate performance and hiring to a longer shift in how the largest companies are run. “Those factors have meant the sales and value-added have gone up dramatically more than employment for the largest firms,” he said, pointing to a model in which big companies concentrate hiring among “professional, talented individuals who are rewarded dramatically, but they’re not sharing…the huge productivity gains with this broader workforce in the way that old, often unionized manufacturing companies or even old-style banks [once did].”
The figures support that reading. Revenue per employee across the Fortune 500 now stands at $687,094 and profit per employee at $68,743, both record highs, while inflation-adjusted wages over the same stretch have barely moved.
AI and jobs: Harvard economist’s warning
Katz expects artificial intelligence to push that divide further still, though he stopped short of forecasting exactly how.
“We are seeing a rise in new business startups, a flourishing of smaller scale enterprises, some of which may eventually become huge, but maybe, as they’re re-engineered to focus on AI agents as their main sort of workers, maybe they don’t end up having as large an employment imprint as traditional firms,” he said, cautioning that the broader effects of AI adoption remain in their early stages.