Amazon Layoffs Take Effect Across Virginia

ALEXANDRIA, VA – Amazon has laid off 691 Northern Virginia residents as of April 27, completing a process that was announced at the beginning of this year. The layoffs affect facilities in five locations in Fairfax, Franconia, Lorton, Alexandria and Falls Church.

In addition, workers in Washington, California, Maryland, and New York will lose their jobs on Tuesday, April 28, Newsweek reports.

Amazon itself reported earlier in April that it had invested more than $190 billion in Virginia since 2010, including more than $119.1 billion in data center infrastructure. The company said those investments have contributed $140 billion to Virginia's gross domestic product since 2010.

But Amazon did not add any jobs at its Arlington headquarters that would qualify for the workforce grant incentives that were part of its agreement with the state of Virginia.

In 2018, Amazon and the state of Virginia signed an agreement that included incentives for certain qualifying jobs, which included a payout of $22,000 for jobs meeting a certain definition, including target annual salaries starting at $150,000, Smart Incentives explains. The total incentive could reach $750 million for 37,850 new jobs by 2038.

Last year, Amazon requested more than $6.4 million through that incentive program for the 293 qualifying jobs it claimed in 2024, according to Virginia Business. In 2025, qualifying jobs at its Crystal City campus, HQ2, had to meet an average annual wage target of $164,016.

This year, Amazon added no such jobs and will not seek a state payment. This represents a steep drop off in hiring, even as much of the region reels from federal job cuts.

The Washington Post reports that Amazon has failed to hit its annual job growth target at HQ2 for the third year in a row. According to Amazon's 2018 agreement, Amazon should have added 11,643 jobs at the site in Crystal City it refers to as HQ2 by the end of 2025. Instead, it created 7,159 jobs. That brings it under a third of the way toward its total goal, the Post points out, instead of 46 percent.

In the bidding war to host Amazon’s second headquarters, Virginia offered as much as $750 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies under then-Governor Ralph Northam. In exchange, in addition to bringing investment to the state, it was supposed to bring jobs. Virginia Business points out that Amazon originally projected it would create 10,000 jobs by 2024, but never hit that mark. Amazon currently has about 8,500 employees at HQ2.

In the meantime, Northern Virginians are out of work in huge numbers, having been hit especially hard by federal budget cuts.

According to an analysis published by the Northern Virginia Regional Commission on April 16, "the Northern Virginia portion of the D.C. Metro Area lost 17,000 federal jobs, a 17.9 percent decline, outpacing the D.C. Metro Area's 16.5 percent drop and well above the national federal employment loss of 11.1 percent. Northern Virginia accounted for about 1 in every 20 federal workforce cuts nationwide, while the D.C. Metro Area accounted for about 1 in every 5, underscoring how concentrated the impact has been in Northern Virginia and the greater D.C. region."

In 2023, in much of Northern Virginia, the federal government's share of total employment was 10 percent or higher, according to the NVRC, and more than 175,000 residents of Northern Virginia were employed by the federal government.

Many of these job losses were among a very specialized, high-salary cohort that experts say could struggle to find comparable work.