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UPS said it would slash up to 30,000 jobs this year and close at least 24 facilities, as the logistics group reckons with a decrease in package volume from Amazon, its largest customer.
The job cuts, representing about 6 per cent of UPS’s global workforce, will target workers responsible for handling and delivering packages. It follows the 20,000 positions it said it was scrapping last year. The company closed 93 facilities in 2025.
The redundancies are intended to boost efficiency, after UPS said last year it had reached an agreement in principle with Amazon to more than halve the volume of packages it delivers for the ecommerce giant by the second half of 2026.
Chief executive Carol Tomé told analysts at the time: “Amazon is our largest customer, but it’s not our most profitable customer. Its margin is very dilutive to the US domestic business.”
Tomé said on Tuesday that UPS had been reducing its Amazon “volume” by approximately 1mn pieces per day, which is expected to continue in 2026.
UPS is betting on a pivot away from transporting Amazon deliveries towards healthcare logistics by delivering products such as vaccines.
Chief financial officer Brian Dykes said the reduction in jobs would be realised through attrition and that UPS expected to offer buyouts to full-time drivers.
“Deliberately shrinking a network is a daunting task, and our success was driven by disciplined planning and effective execution as well as the added flexibility and efficiency that’s coming from deploying state-of-the-art technology and automation across a smaller and nimbler network,” said Tomé.
The announcement by UPS, made during its fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, comes amid wider concerns about the health of the US job market. The economy added fewer than predicted jobs in December, although the unemployment rate fell.
UPS has approximately 490,000 employees worldwide, more than half of whom are represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union.
The company beat analyst expectations to post fourth-quarter consolidated revenues of $24.5bn.
Its share price was little changed on Tuesday.