What’s behind the unusual drop? For 2026, the answer lies, in part, in who left the list.
The 22 companies that replaced the drop-offs employed fewer than half that amount: 317,414. The largest employer among the newcomers is Amentum Holdings, a Virginia-based engineering and technology services company with a headcount of 50,000; followed by Medline, an Illinois-based health care supply business that employs 45,000.
But for a group of companies that collectively employ tens of millions of people, employment among incumbent firms was, in fact, remarkably steady, growing only 0.1%. That reflects the “low-hire, low-fire economy,” says Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University.
Retailing is the largest sector on the list, with just over 7 million employees, and its total headcount dropped 0.9%. Employment in the second-largest sector, technology, dropped 1% to 3.8 million, while the number of workers in the third-largest sector, financials, grew 0.9% to 3.5 million.
Large firms have outsourced labor-intensive work while reaping technology’s huge productivity gains. “Those factors have meant the sales and value-added have gone up dramatically more than employment for the largest firms,” Katz says. Big companies hire “professional, talented individuals who are rewarded dramatically, but they’re not sharing…the huge productivity gains with this broader workforce in the way that old, often unionized manufacturing companies or even old-style banks [once did].”
AI seems poised to push the trend further as CEOs urge their workforces to capture the technology’s efficiency benefits. But the upside is not necessarily reserved for the titans of industry that currently occupy the Fortune 500.
“We are seeing a rise in new business startups, a flourishing of smaller scale enterprises, some of which may eventually become huge, but maybe, as they’re re-engineered to focus on AI agents as their main sort of workers, maybe they don’t end up having as large an employment imprint as traditional firms,” says Katz, adding a note of caution that we’re still in the early days of AI adoption.
Notably, two newcomers on this year’s list have fewer than 1,000 employees. Both operate in the digital asset space: Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Bitgo Holdings employs 603 people and landed at No. 278 on the Fortune 500. New York-based Galaxy Digital has 700 employees and cracked the Fortune 100 at No. 76 in its list debut. The next smallest employer in the top 100 has nearly eight times as many.
