Qualcomm Layoffs: Severance, San Diego WARN Notices, Timeline and Employee Guide

Twenty notices, 105 people: the filing pattern changed, not the scale

In October 2023 Qualcomm notified 1,254 California workers on three filings. In April 2026 it notified 105 on twenty, each naming a single building — “Qualcomm Incorporated (5565 Morehouse Drive)” and so on — with individual notices as small as one worker. A reader who counts filings would conclude 2026 was the bigger event. A reader who counts people would conclude the opposite, and be right. This matters beyond Qualcomm: WARN filing counts are a popular metric on layoff tracker sites precisely because they are easy to compute, and they are close to meaningless without the worker totals underneath them.

Headcount has been rising while the reductions continue

Qualcomm reported approximately 50,000 workers at the end of fiscal 2023, 49,000 at fiscal 2024 and 52,000 at fiscal 2025. So the company grew by about 3,000 in the year in which it also recognised $39 million of restructuring charges, and it has gone on recognising more in fiscal 2026. That combination means a reduction in your group is a reallocation rather than a retrenchment, and it makes internal transfer a more realistic route here than at a company shrinking across the board. The qualifier is the turnover rate: at approximately 6% voluntary turnover, Qualcomm loses very few people by choice, so internal openings are scarcer than a growing headcount implies.

Fiscal 2026 severance spending already exceeds all of fiscal 2025

Qualcomm's tagged restructuring charges were $712 million in fiscal 2023, $107 million in fiscal 2024 and $39 million in fiscal 2025. Its first nine months of fiscal 2026 carry $97 million, substantially all severance — so the year is already running at more than twice the fiscal 2025 level with a quarter still to report. The within-year shape is also upward: nothing in the first fiscal quarter, $29 million in the second, $68 million in the third. Neither figure is near the 2023 peak, but the direction is unambiguous and it is the opposite of what a reader would infer from the small April WARN numbers.

Qualcomm attaches no programme name or reason to any of it

T-Mobile calls its reduction the 2025-2026 Workforce Transformation and describes what it targets. Cigna names a restructuring programme and reports it to date. Centene dates its voluntary separation programme to the day it was committed. Qualcomm does none of this: its filings record “restructuring and restructuring-related charges (substantially all of which related to severance costs)” inside other expenses, with no programme, no stated rationale and no headcount. The practical consequence is that almost every explanation you will read about why Qualcomm is cutting — a pivot to automotive, to the Internet of Things, to data-centre processors — is analyst inference rather than company disclosure, and should be treated as such when you are making decisions about your own career.

United States

Qualcomm's quarterly filings confirm the spending and its nature — $97 million of restructuring and restructuring-related charges across the first nine months of fiscal 2026, “substantially all of which related to severance costs” — and nothing else. There is no programme name, no stated rationale, no headcount and no per-person terms. No Qualcomm severance plan appears in its public filings. [1],[2],[5]

Note: Dividing $97 million by our WARN total of 105 workers would produce a nonsensical figure, because the charge is global and covers far more people than the California filings do, and because it includes employer-side costs.

United States

A consistent set of figures circulates in forum and community discussion of Qualcomm severance, and we include it here because people will find it anyway and are better served by seeing it labelled than by seeing it presented as fact elsewhere. These are unverified employee reports. We name no individuals, quote no posts and treat none of this as establishing anything. Where reports agree with each other that is some evidence of a common practice; where they disagree, the range is the honest answer. [1]

Note: Everything in this row is unverified. We publish it labelled because the alternative is that readers encounter the same numbers on sites that present them as established fact, and because a clearly marked range is more useful than silence when a reader is trying to judge whether their own offer is out of line. Do not rely on any figure here. The estimator below is pre-filled with the commonly reported structure precisely so you can see what it implies and then test your own letter against it.

Search by address, not by employer name

Qualcomm's 2026 California filings name individual buildings in the employer field — “Qualcomm Incorporated (5565 Morehouse Drive)”, “Qualcomm Incorporated (10185 McKellar Ct.)” and seventeen more. That has a direct practical consequence: if you are trying to find your own WARN notice on the state report, searching for “Qualcomm” may not return the row that covers you, and a tracker site that indexes by company name may have split your round across twenty separate entries or missed some entirely. Search by city and by street instead. It also explains a discrepancy you may run into: counts of “Qualcomm WARN notices” differ wildly between sources because some are counting notices and some are counting people, and for 2026 those two numbers are twenty and 105. [6],[7]

October 2023 distorts every Qualcomm layoff statistic you will read

A single day — 11 October 2023 — accounts for 1,254 of the 1,635 Qualcomm workers noticed in our entire dataset, or more than three quarters of them. Any cumulative figure for Qualcomm layoffs is therefore mostly a three-year-old event, and any average per filing or per year is close to meaningless. This is not a minor statistical quibble: someone assessing their risk at Qualcomm in 2026 who reads a cumulative total will substantially overestimate current activity, while someone who reads only the April 2026 WARN numbers will underestimate it, because the charges have been rising while the California notices have been small. The honest current picture needs both: small, repeated, San Diego-centred reductions, against severance spending that has already more than doubled year on year. [7],[5],[1]

Morehouse Drive has had notices in four consecutive years

The same San Diego street appears in the October 2023 notice for 1,064 workers, the September 2024 notice for 226, the January 2025 notice for 50, and seven separate building-level notices in April 2026. Twelve filings and 1,445 workers in total. That is the most location-specific finding on this page and it is actionable in a plain way: if Morehouse Drive is your worksite, the base rate over the last four years is a reduction every year, and having come through one is not evidence about the next. It argues for keeping your equity vesting schedule, your network and your externally-legible accomplishments current as a standing practice rather than as a response to an announcement. [6],[7]

At an engineering company, the equity forfeiture is usually larger than the severance

Qualcomm's own 10-K says the substantial majority of its employees work in engineering or technical roles, and at this level of the semiconductor industry a large share of total compensation arrives as restricted stock vesting over several years. Two consequences follow that the severance conversation routinely ignores. What you forfeit in unvested equity on an involuntary termination can exceed the entire cash severance, and it is governed by the equity plan and your award agreement rather than by the separation terms — a separate document you have to read. And if a tranche vests within weeks of your proposed termination date, asking for the date to move is typically the single highest-value request available to you: it costs Qualcomm very little and can be worth more than several weeks of pay. Work out the equity position first, then decide whether the offer is adequate. [3]

California's final-pay rule applies to almost every Qualcomm US separation

All twenty-five Qualcomm filings in our dataset are California filings, which means the state's own wage rules govern most Qualcomm US separations, and they are materially stricter than the federal baseline. On a discharge, California requires all wages due to be paid at the time of termination rather than on the next regular payroll date, and accrued vacation is treated as earned wages that cannot be forfeited. So two things are worth checking against your final paycheck rather than assuming. That it arrived on your last day rather than two weeks later, and that accrued vacation is in it at the correct rate. California also voids a release of a wage claim taken before the wages are paid, so a broadly worded separation agreement does not dispose of a final-pay shortfall. If your final pay looks wrong, that is a separate question from the severance negotiation and it has its own remedy. [7],[10]

Four Qualcomm petitioners, and the one on your visa may not be the one on your badge

Federal H-1B data for fiscal year 2023 shows four separate Qualcomm petitioners: Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. with 584 continuing approvals across three tax IDs, Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. with 48, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. with 29, and QUALCOMM Incorporated with 20. The great majority of petitions come from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. — while the WARN notices are filed by QUALCOMM Incorporated. That gap is worth taking seriously if you are on a work visa, because your petition names a specific legal entity and an internal move between Qualcomm companies is not always the simple transfer it appears to be. Check the entity on your own I-129 approval rather than assuming, and raise any mismatch with qualified immigration counsel independently of any layoff question. The same entity distinction also affects benefit plans and service records for everyone, visa or not. [8],[6]