Leadership2 publishers2 min readPublished
Disney's third round of cuts under D'Amaro reaches its HR and tech staff
Disney is cutting about 300 jobs, mostly in HR and tech, according to CNBC's source, in the third round of layoffs since Josh D'Amaro became CEO in March. The cost programme has now reached the HR staff who administer it. The wider jobs data does not yet show other employers doing the same.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- In April, Disney cut about 1,000 roles, most of them in its newly consolidated marketing organisation.
- Disney's August 2026 earnings report said it was evaluating cost levers including reductions in labour and SG&A.
- Deadline reported a voluntary retirement offer to Disney directors and above who are 50 or older and have at least ten years at the company.
- Laid-off non-managers with under five years' service get four weeks' pay, and longer-serving ones get a week per year up to 52 weeks, Business Insider reported.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The HR-heavy reading depends on CNBC's single anonymous source; Business Insider's source says only that tech and HR are among the teams hit, so how concentrated the round is in HR is unconfirmed.
- constraint Thinning HR while a director-level retirement offer is open and more reductions are signalled leaves fewer people to process the exits still to come.
- cost Because non-manager severance rises with tenure to as much as 52 weeks' pay, cutting long-serving HR and tech staff saves less in year one than the salary line suggests.
- decision HR leaders elsewhere have no basis in this record for budgeting a wave of support-function cuts, since overall announced US layoffs are running well below last year.
Measured against headcount, the September round is small. Disney had 231,000 employees at the end of fiscal 2025, according to Deadline [10], so 300 roles is about 0.13% of the workforce [1]. This round and April's together come to roughly 1,300 jobs [2]. That total leaves out July, when Disney cut several hundred people in corporate functions across Pixar, ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television and its studios [6].
The 0.13% figure does not show the order in which the cuts have moved. Support staff inside the divisions were already exposed in July [6]. What September adds, according to CNBC's anonymous source, is a round in which most of the roles are in HR and tech [1]. In my view, these are the SG&A reductions Disney's August report said it was weighing [7]. D'Amaro said in an April memo that the cuts were "not a reflection of their contributions, or of the overall strength of the company." [13]
On size alone, 0.13% is housekeeping. But the company has said it is not finished. "We are mid-stream in this work and will provide future updates on our progress," Disney said in the August report [8]. I think the trade-off it has accepted is lower overhead this quarter against a smaller HR team next quarter, when the take-up of the retirement offer [9] and any further round still have to be processed.
For HR leaders at other companies, the national figures give little reason to treat Disney as the start of a trend. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 529,914 announced US job cuts through August 2026, down 41% from 892,362 in the first eight months of 2025 [12]. US media companies have announced 4,908 cuts so far this year [11]. Neither source breaks those figures down by function, so the evidence does not show HR and tech staff being singled out anywhere beyond Disney.
What to watch
- Disney's next update to investors on its cost programme, and whether it confirms the September count and the HR and tech share.
- Take-up of the voluntary retirement offer among directors aged 50 and over with a decade of service.
- Whether other large employers announce cuts concentrated in HR and technology, which would give the wider-pattern claim the evidence it currently lacks.