TCS to lay off over 12,000 employees this year; mid, senior level staff to be impacted

TCS will lay off around 12,261 employees, mostly mid and senior staff, as part of a restructuring plan. The company cites workforce realignment and slower tech demand amid global uncertainty.

New Delhi: India’s largest IT services firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), is set to lay off about 2 per cent, or 12,261 employees, of its global workforce this year, with the majority of those impacted belonging to middle and senior grades.

As of June 30, 2025, TCS’s workforce stood at 6,13,069. It increased its workforce by 5,000 employees in the recently concluded April-June quarter.

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The move is part of the company’s broader strategy to become a “future-ready organisation”, focusing on investments in technology, AI deployment, market expansion and workforce realignment, TCS said in a statement.

“TCS is on a journey to become a Future-Ready organisation. This includes strategic initiatives on multiple fronts, including investing in new-tech areas, entering new markets, deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves, deepening our partnerships, creating next-gen infrastructure and realigning our workforce model.

“Towards this, a number of reskilling and redeployment initiatives have been underway. As part of this journey, we will also be releasing associates from the organisation whose deployment may not be feasible. This will impact about 2 per cent of our global workforce, primarily in the middle and the senior grades, over the course of the year,” it said.

TCS will provide appropriate benefits, outplacement, counselling and support to the impacted employees, it added.

The move comes at a time when India’s top IT services companies have delivered single-digit revenue growth in Q1FY26, capping off a somewhat sobering June quarter as macroeconomic instability and geopolitical tensions weighed on global tech demand and delayed client decision-making.

For TCS, the revenue rose 1.3 per cent year-on-year to Rs 63,437 crore, and the bottomline improved 5.9 per cent to Rs 12,760 crore in Q1FY26.

TCS MD and Chief Executive K Krithivasan recently said the company is experiencing a “demand contraction” due to the continued uncertainties on the macroeconomic and geopolitical fronts, and added that he does not see a double-digit revenue growth in FY26.

Krithivasan explained the delays in decision-making experienced in the preceding quarter have “intensified” now, and hoped for the discretionary spends — a prime mover of revenue growth for IT companies — to return once the uncertainties ebb.

Microsoft, the second most valuable publicly listed company after Nvidia globally, has so far laid off over 15,000 employees in 2025, which is 7 per cent of the company’s global workforce.

In a memo to over 200,000 employees last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the layoffs this year have been “weighing heavily” on him.

“This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he said in the memo to staff.

He added: “Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.”

According to Layoffs.fyi — a platform that tracks global tech industry layoffs — over 80,000 tech workers have been laid off across 169 tech companies in 2025 alone.

In 2024, that number stood at a staggering 1.5 lakh across 551 tech companies — the stark numbers coinciding as much with global macroeconomic woes as with deep debate in tech circles about the impact of AI on job roles, workforce and employability.