Record revenues. Record profits. Record revenue per employee. The Fortune 500 is richer than ever—and employing fewer people
Up and to the right: that’s the story of nearly all the collective data from the 2026 Fortune 500, which ranks the largest U.S. companies by revenue. Together, the companies generated record revenue of $21 trillion, up 5% from a year ago. Total profits ballooned 12% to $2.1 trillion, and overall market cap surged 19% to $55 trillion in a fiscal year fueled by outsize AI spending and hype. There’s one big exception. The Fortune 500’s total headcount decreased for the second straight year to 30.5 million employees, down 1%. That’s a loss of 301,049 workers. Fortune 500 headcount has declined before, but since 1995, when the Fortune 500 incorporated service firms for the first time, a downward trend has only taken place during or after a recession. What’s behind the unusual drop? For 2026, the answer lies, in part, in who left the list. The Fortune 500 is the sum of its parts, so its overall headcount fluctuates as companies join and drop off of the ranking. A major blow to 2026 list headcount was the departure of Walgreens Boots Alliance, the pharmacy chain, which fell out of the Fortune 500 after being acquired by private equity firm Sycamore Partners in August 2025. Last year, Walgreens employed 252,500 people, landing it among the top 25 biggest employers on the 2025 list. A second labor-heavy retailer Nordstrom also fell off the list in a take-private deal; it employed 41,000 people. Collectively, 659,640 people worked at the 22 companies that departed the Fortune 500 this year. The 22 companies that replaced the drop-offs employed less than half that amount: 317,414. The largest employer among the newcomers is Amentum Holdings, a Virginia-based engineering and technology services company with a headcount of 50,000; followed by Medline, an Illinois-based health care supply business that employs 45,000. Headcount growth among incumbent firms offset, to a small degree, the headcount decline caused by list churn. In total, the firms that remained on the list fr