Boeing will cut about 5% of the workforce in its Commercial Airplanes division, the company told employees in a memo on Monday, as persistent delays in ramping up production of its best-selling jets force a retrenchment in staffing.
The division employed just over 50,000 people at the end of 2025, which puts the reduction at roughly 2,500 jobs. Stephanie Pope, who runs Boeing's commercial airplane business, wrote in the memo that the slower production plan "puts us in an overstaffed position" and that headcount needs to be realigned with the unit's revised business plan, according to a memo reviewed by CNBC.
The reduction will come through a mix of attrition and involuntary layoffs, with formal notifications beginning in December. Boeing has not disclosed which sites or job functions will be hit hardest, though the cuts fall within the same commercial division that builds the 737 Max, 787 Dreamliner and 777 families.
A ramp that keeps slipping
The staffing reduction is the clearest sign yet that Boeing's long-promised production recovery is running behind schedule. Chief executive Kelly Ortberg told analysts last month that wing production had been slower than expected and that the company would miss its 2026 output and delivery targets for the 737 Max. Boeing now expects to reach 47 jets a month in early 2027, not the summer of 2026 as previously planned, with the long-standing goal of 52 a month pushed back to the second half of 2027.
The 787 Dreamliner program has its own bottleneck: output has been stuck at eight aircraft a month, and Boeing has struggled for more than a year to push that rate up to ten, according to production data reported by Simple Flying.
The slower ramp comes six years after the 737 Max was grounded worldwide following two fatal crashes, and after a 2024 door-panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines Max renewed regulatory scrutiny of Boeing's factory floor. The Federal Aviation Administration has kept a production cap on the Max in place since that incident, and Boeing executives have repeatedly said that quality and regulatory sign-off, not speed, are now the company's priority as it works to rebuild trust with regulators, airlines and its own machinists.
That slower, more deliberate pace has been good for safety messaging but costly for Boeing's bottom line, since the company is paid in large part when aircraft are delivered, not when they are built. Each month the Max ramp slips is a month of deferred revenue, which helps explain why a division still short of its output goals is simultaneously announcing job cuts.
Boeing has not said whether unionized machinist jobs will be affected or commented publicly beyond the internal memo. The reductions are expected to continue through the early part of 2027 as the company works toward its 52-jet-a-month Max target and tries to stabilize the 787 line, with investors and airline customers likely to watch Boeing's next quarterly results for signs of whether the slower ramp — and the smaller workforce behind it — is starting to narrow the delivery backlog.
