Amazon & Walmart among America's biggest companies that earned $2.1 trillion last year, employing fewer people than ever

Published 20 June 2026 · us

Every headline number in this year's Fortune 500 points in the same direction: revenue, profit and market value all hit records. Yet for the first

Every headline number in this year's Fortune 500 points in the same direction: revenue, profit and market value all hit records. Yet for the first time outside a recession since the list began including service firms in 1995, the companies on it collectively employed fewer people than the year before, shedding 301,049 jobs even as their profits surged. Galaxy Digital, Bitgo Holdings: Fortune 500's smallest staffs Nowhere is the shift clearer than at the bottom of the employee count and the top of the rankings. Galaxy Digital, a New York-based digital asset firm, broke into the Fortune 100 this year at number 76 with a staff of just 700, a fraction of what any other company in that tier carries; the next-smallest employer within the top 100 has nearly eight times as many people on payroll. Further down the list, Bitgo Holdings, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, entered at number 278 with only 603 employees. Between them, two companies now sit among America's largest by revenue while employing barely more than 1,300 people combined, a glimpse, perhaps, of what a Fortune 500 firm can look like when headcount stops being the measure of scale.

Fortune 500 headcount 2026: why it fell The headline figure for 2026 is stark: total employment across the Fortune 500 fell to 30.5 million, a drop of 301,049 jobs, even as combined revenue reached a record $21 trillion, up 5 per cent, and profit climbed 12 per cent to $2.1 trillion. Market value rose 19 per cent to $55 trillion, propelled largely by spending on, and enthusiasm for, artificial intelligence. But most of the headcount decline did not come from layoffs inside companies that stayed on the list. It came from which companies left it. Walgreens Boots Alliance, one of the 25 biggest employers on last year's ranking with 252,500 staff, dropped off after being taken private by the buyout firm Sycamore Partners in August 2025. Nordstrom, with 41,000 employees, exited through a similar take-private deal. Across all 22 companies that fell off the list this year, the combined workforce came to 659,640 people. Fortune 500 newcomers: half the workforce The 22 companies that took their place did not come close to filling that gap. Together they employed 317,414 people, less than half the workforce of the firms they replaced. Amentum Holdings, a Virginia-based engineering and technology services company, was the largest of the newcomers with 50,000 employees, followed by Medline, an Illinois healthcare supply business, with 45,000.