Boeing has more than 6,300 airliners on order, a backlog it values at a record $612 billion. And on Monday 9 November 2026, it told the people who build those aircraft that it has too many of them.

In a memo to employees, Stephanie Pope, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said the division will reduce its workforce by approximately 5% through a combination of attrition and involuntary layoffs. Notifications will begin in December.

These Boeing layoffs are a strange-sounding problem for a company that cannot build jets fast enough to satisfy its customers. The explanation is that Boeing has decided to stop trying to build them quite so fast.

Around 2,500 jobs

Boeing has not published an exact number. The commercial division employed 50,494 people at the end of 2025, according to figures on Boeing’s own website cited by HRD America, so a 5% cut works out at roughly 2,500 positions. Part of that will come from open jobs simply left unfilled.

Seattle public radio station KUOW reported that a Boeing spokesperson would not say which programmes will be affected. That matters in Washington State, where Boeing employs around 65,000 people, and where the 737 is assembled in Renton and the widebodies in Everett.

Because many US states require 60 days’ notice for mass layoffs, notices going out in December mean the first departures are unlikely before late January.

Why the ramp slowed

The root of the decision lies in Boeing’s third-quarter results in late October. CEO Kelly Ortberg told analysts that Boeing would miss its 737 production and delivery targets for 2026. The company had hoped to build 47 737s a month by summer 2026; it now expects to reach that rate in early 2027, with 52 a month following in the second half of 2027.

The bottleneck, Ortberg said, is wings. Renton cannot yet produce them at a stable pace for the higher rate, and after the quality crises of recent years Boeing has made a point of refusing to push the line faster than it can safely run.

The widebody side is not much better. Boeing has struggled to lift 787 Dreamliner output from eight to ten a month, and both the 767 and 777 programmes have been disrupted, including the 777 Freighter stoppage covered on Afterburner last month. In the third quarter, the commercial division delivered 161 aircraft but posted an operating loss of $697 million on revenue of $10.7 billion.

KOMO News reports on Boeing’s plan to cut about 5% of its commercial airplane workforce, with notices starting in December.

Plans built for a faster factory

This is the logic Pope laid out to staff. Boeing spent two years hiring, training and investing to stabilise its factories. That staffing plan assumed a steep production ramp. With the ramp slowed, the headcount no longer matches the work.

Pope credited the same investments with improving quality and delivery performance, changing Boeing’s culture and securing certification of the 737 MAX 10 and 737 MAX 7. But she was blunt that the recovery is not complete, writing that while the company had made substantial progress, it had not yet fully recovered.

Affected employees will be offered company-sponsored outplacement services, layoff benefits and support through Boeing’s Employee Assistance Program, according to the memo as reported by Anadolu Agency.

The first cut since 2024

This is Boeing’s first workforce reduction since October 2024, when Ortberg, only weeks into the job, announced that the company would cut about 10% of its global workforce, roughly 17,000 jobs. Boeing was then reeling from a machinists’ strike and the fallout from the door-plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 earlier that year.

The 2026 version is smaller and has a different cause. In 2024, Boeing cut because it was bleeding cash. In 2026, it is cutting because it has chosen to build aircraft more slowly than it planned, and would rather carry fewer people than build ahead of its wings.

For airlines waiting on their 737s and 787s, the message is the same either way: the backlog is not going anywhere, and neither is the queue.

Sources: Anadolu Agency, AeroTime, KUOW, HRD America (citing Reuters), KOMO News, Reuters (David Shepardson)