UPS said this week that it is cutting up to 30,000 jobs in 2026 as part of an effort to shrink costs.  

The delivery giant says a big reason for the job reductions is that it plans to handle fewer packages for Amazon, its largest customer, but not its most profitable. The company has been lowering Amazon volume since 2025, aiming to cut it by about half by late 2026 as more of that business shifts to Amazon’s own delivery network. 

“By the end of the year [2025], we reached our volume reduction target and reduced Amazon’s volume in our network by approximately 1 million pieces per day,” UPS CEO Carol Tome said during a company earnings call on Tuesday.

Dropping cheaper, heavier Amazon deliveries will allow UPS to focus on more profitable shipments, including healthcare, small business and international parcels. 

The strategic pivot comes with a human cost: fewer packages mean fewer jobs for the drivers and warehouse workers who move boxes through the system. Brian Dykes, UPS’s chief financial officer, said during the earnings call that this year’s job reductions would be in “operational positions,” or delivery and warehouse jobs.

He said the job cuts would occur through attrition, or not replacing people who leave, and through “voluntary separation” packages offered to full-time drivers. Layoffs are not planned, Dykes said. 

Dykes also brought up other initiatives UPS is taking to cut costs, including plans to shutter two dozen buildings in the first half of the year and measures to “deploy automation” across the network. Automation initiatives include automated sorting and AI-driven routing. 

In 2025, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs, launched driver buyouts and shut down daily operations in 93 facilities as it faced rising labor and operating costs and intense competition from rivals like FedEx. 

UPS estimates it saved $3.5 billion in 2025 and predicts it will save another $3 billion in 2026. 

UPS employed around half a million people around the world at the beginning of 2025, per The New York Times. Around 300,000 of those employees are members of the Teamsters union, a major North American labor union representing 1.3 million active members. 

At the same time UPS announced the job reductions for this year, it also reported its 2025 earnings. The shipping giant brought in a net income of $5.57 billion for 2025, down nearly 4% from its net income in 2024. Revenue was $88.7 billion for 2025, down from $91.1 billion in 2024. 

Amazon is already disrupting the dominance of established delivery giants like UPS. The e-commerce company handled 6.3 billion deliveries in the United States in 2024, ahead of both UPS and FedEx. 

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