Boeing Will Cut About 5% of Its Commercial Airplanes Workforce as the 737 Ramp Runs Late

Boeing will cut about 5% of the workforce at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, the division that builds the 737 MAX and the 787, its chief executive Stephanie Pope told employees in a memo on Monday, November 9, 2026. The reduction will come “through a combination of attrition and involuntary layoffs, with notifications beginning in December,” according to the memo as quoted by CNBC.

Pope tied the cut to the pace of production. “Adjusting our production schedules and reducing aircraft output puts us in an overstaffed position,” she wrote, adding that the division must “align our staffing levels to our revised business plan.”

How many jobs are involved

The memo gives a percentage, not a headcount. AeroTime estimated the cut at roughly 2,500 jobs, based on a Commercial Airplanes workforce of about 50,500 at the end of 2025.

For scale, Boeing as a whole employed about 182,000 people at the end of 2025, according to its annual report. How the cut splits between attrition and layoffs, and which sites and job types it hits, had not been disclosed at the time of writing.

The memo, which Leeham News also viewed, credits the division with progress, including the certification of the 737 MAX 7 and MAX 10. “While we have made substantial progress, we have not yet fully recovered,” Pope wrote.

Why the slower ramp leaves Boeing overstaffed

The cut follows Boeing’s third-quarter results on October 27, which pushed back the rate increases the division had been building toward. In its quarterly filing with the SEC, Boeing says the 737 program began moving from 42 to 47 jets a month in the second quarter of 2026, with the FAA’s concurrence.

Boeing now expects to stabilize at 47 only in 2027. The filing says the next step, to 52 a month, comes after the factory has “demonstrated stability at rate 47 for a period of time.”

On the earnings call, CEO Kelly Ortberg pointed to wing production as the part of the ramp running slower than expected, CNBC reported. He said Boeing would not significantly raise 737 MAX output until the second half of 2027.

The 787 is in a similar holding pattern. Boeing says Dreamliner production stabilized at eight a month after a brief supply-chain slowdown in April, and that in the third quarter it delayed planned increases, with the next step beyond eight now set to begin in December 2026.

Further 787 increases depend on expansion work at Boeing’s Charleston facility and on suppliers’ ability to keep up, the filing adds.

What the third quarter showed

The division’s numbers show the gap between demand and output. Boeing reported these Commercial Airplanes figures for the three months to September 30, 2026:

Measure	Q3 2026
Deliveries	161 (124 737s, 22 787s, 10 767s, 5 777s)
Net orders	300
Revenue	$10.7 billion, down 3%
Operating loss	$697 million (margin of minus 6.5%)
Backlog	Over 6,300 airplanes, a record $612 billion

That is the core of Pope’s argument. With more than 6,300 jets on order, Boeing is not short of customers: it is short of the output its staffing plan assumed.

People hired for rate increases that have now slipped cost money every month the factory runs below the planned rates. Trimming staff to the revised plan cuts that cost while the wing and supply bottlenecks are worked through.

Smaller than the 2024 cut

This round is narrower than Boeing’s last one. On October 11, 2024, during the machinists’ strike, Ortberg told employees Boeing planned “to reduce the size of our total workforce by roughly 10 percent,” including executives and managers.

That came to about 17,000 jobs based on Boeing’s December 2023 headcount, ABC7 reported. The new cut covers one division and about half the share.

It also lands about five weeks after Boeing’s Washington engineers and technicians ratified a new SPEEA contract, and three weeks after the FAA certified the 737 MAX 10, the last MAX variant awaiting approval.