- T-Mobile’s U.S. headcount dropped by 4,671 jobs in the first half of 2026, according to parent Deutsche Telekom
- Former DT exec and current T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan is overseeing the latest restructuring
- T-Mobile said it’s constantly looking at where to allocate resources so it can invest in areas that “matter the most to our customers”
It seems as though the job cuts keep coming at T-Mobile – more than six years after executives ludicrously argued that the merger with Sprint would lead to more jobs, not fewer.
The Bellevue, Washington-based operator reduced its headcount by a whopping 4,671 positions in the U.S. since the first of the year, according to an interim report filed last week by parent Deutsche Telekom (DT).
T-Mobile’s U.S. headcount stood at 65,365 as of June 30, 2026, a 6.7% reduction from the December 31, 2025, total of 70,036.
When T-Mobile and Sprint initially agreed to merge, they said the new company would employ more people in the U.S. than both companies would separately. “More than 200,000 people will work on behalf of the combined company in the U.S. at the start,” they said in announcing the merger in 2018.
By the time the deal was final in 2020, the combined headcount of the two companies was around 80,000.
Srini Gopalan oversees cuts
T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan, who took over from Mike Sievert in November, is overseeing the latest round of cuts, which began in the fourth quarter of 2025.
That’s when the company started to implement a restructuring initiative to “streamline operations by centralizing leaders and teams, reducing organizational layers, and eliminating duplicative roles,” according to an SEC filing.
During 2025, the company recorded a pre-tax charge of $390 million related to the 2025 “Workforce Transformation,” with substantially all associated employee separations and related cash outflows expected to be complete in 2026.
The most recent round of cuts comes after an initiative in August 2023 to reduce the size of its workforce by about 5,000 positions, just under 7% of its total employee base, primarily in corporate and back-office functions, and some technology roles.
UScellular acquisition and job redundancies
Some of the cuts are related to the UScellular acquisition. In August 2025, T-Mobile closed on the $4.3 billion acquisition of UScellular, which had about 4 million subscribers.
Earlier in 2025, UScellular had filed WARN notices signaling that it was laying off its entire workforce of 4,100 employees in the 21 states where it operated. UScellular said it had made arrangements with T-Mobile to offer employment to a majority of those employees “at a salary or wage rate and with benefits, that when taken as a whole, are no less favorable to these employees’ current salary or wage rate and benefits.”
At that time, T-Mobile said it had extended offers to “a large number of UScellular employees” but didn’t specify how many.
T-Mobile: Constantly evaluating
Asked this week about the latest round of layoffs, T-Mobile provided the following statement to Fierce:
“We’re constantly looking at where we allocate our resources so we can invest in the areas that matter the most to our customers. In our 2025 10-K, our employee count actually increased due to acquisitions completed in 2025 and the timing of workforce transformation initiatives.”
Fierce also asked about the impact of retail store closures, a trend that has been underway for a while.
“As we shared at Capital Markets Day almost two years ago, we’re evolving our retail footprint over time to have fewer stores, and for that footprint to be increasingly company-owned stores that are better staffed by our T-Mobile experts and supported by digital tools like T-Life. We’ve been executing on that plan throughout this year,” T-Mobile said in a statement.
More stories about layoffs at T-Mobile:
T-Mobile layoffs continue with IT job cuts