Boeing to Cut About 5% of Commercial Airplane Workforce as 737 MAX Ramp Slows

Boeing will cut about 5% of its commercial airplane workforce through layoffs and attrition, the division's chief told employees on Monday.

Attrition means employees who leave and are not replaced. The rest of the reduction will come through involuntary layoffs.

Stephanie Pope leads Boeing Commercial Airplanes, the company's planemaking division. She announced the cut in a memo to employees on Monday.

"Adjusting our production schedules and reducing aircraft output puts us in an overstaffed position," Pope wrote.

"We need to align our staffing levels to our revised business plan," she wrote.

The memo put the reduction at approximately 5%. It will happen through attrition and involuntary layoffs, with notifications beginning in December.

Boeing gave no number for how many jobs the cut covers. It also named no teams, sites or roles in the reporting.

"I know how difficult these actions are and the impact they will have on all of us, our families, and our communities," Pope wrote.

A division cut, not a companywide one

The 5% applies to Commercial Airplanes alone. It does not cover Boeing's defense, space or services businesses.

The division employed 50,494 people in December 2025, according to Boeing's published employment figures. Reuters reported that count.

Five percent of that headcount is about 2,500 positions. That is a TickerGrove calculation, not a figure Boeing has given.

Boeing employed about 182,000 people in total in December 2025. That makes the division a little over a quarter of the company, a calculation.

The memo lands about a month after Boeing's engineers and technical staff approved new contracts. FOX 13 reported that vote averted a looming strike.

The ramp is the stated reason

"We need to reset the pace of our production rate ramps," Pope wrote. The pause gives factories and supply chain partners more time to achieve stability.

Pope tied the memo directly to the third-quarter earnings message. She also credited employees with the recent 737-7 and 737-10 certifications.

Rate 47 means a pace of 47 jets a month. Boeing is still working to stabilize production there.

Chief Executive Kelly Ortberg addressed the ramp on October 27. He was speaking on Boeing's third-quarter earnings call.

"It is taking us longer than we had expected to demonstrate performance at rate 47," Ortberg said.

Wing output is the pacing work, he said. Stabilizing at 47 will take into next year.

The next step, 52 a month, is now a financial-plan target. Ortberg placed it in the back half of 2027.

"It is more important that we do this ramp right than in what particular month we achieve a rate break," Ortberg said.

Boeing also expects 737 deliveries to fall shy of 500 this year. Chief Financial Officer Jay Malave tied the miss to the delay at rate 47.

Reuters noted the earlier aim was rate 47 by summer 2026. Early 2027 is the current expectation for that pace.

The move comes while Boeing works through years of regulatory scrutiny. It is still trying to lift deliveries of the 737 MAX and 787.

Narrower than the 2024 round

The cut is narrower than the companywide reduction Boeing announced in 2024. That round came in October 2024, soon after Ortberg took over as chief executive.

Boeing then planned to lay off about 10% of its workers. The Associated Press put that at about 17,000 people.

The company had about 170,000 employees worldwide at the time. Those cuts were companywide and landed during a machinists' strike.

Smaller cuts have followed since. Bloomberg reported in February 2026 that Boeing eliminated about 300 supply-chain jobs in its defense division.

This reduction covers one division at half that percentage. Its mix of layoffs and attrition is also still unstated.

Shares barely moved in intraday trading

Shares were up about 0.1% in intraday trading on Monday. The Finnhub snapshot is as of 2:43 p.m. ET, from Friday's $173.40 close.

That move is intraday only, not a settled reaction. Monday's closing price is the first settled verdict.

What remains unknown

What remains unknown starts with Boeing's own public account. No Boeing statement or securities filing on the cut was found in the retrieved record.

The memo itself is known only second-hand. The Seattle Times reported it first, and FOX 13 obtained the email.

How the cut splits between layoffs and attrition is unknown. So are the teams, sites and roles it will reach.

Boeing has published no current division headcount. The December 2025 count is the latest in the retrieved record.

No response from Boeing's unions was found in the retrieved record. That includes the machinists' union and SPEEA, the engineers' union.

Whether Boeing books a charge or states savings is also unknown. The company has announced neither with the memo.

Monday's settled share reaction is also unknown. Only the intraday snapshot above was available at build time.

December notices are the next test

What to watch: the December notifications. They will show how many employees are actually told to leave.

The split is the second test for readers. A cut met mostly by attrition lands differently from one met by layoffs.

Production stability is the third test. Rate 47 holding steady into 2027 is the premise the memo rests on.