Tata Consultancy Services is set to continue its ‘restructuring efforts’ during the final quarter of FY26 — after headcount dropped by more than 11,000 people during Q3FY26. The details came amid growing allegations of forced resignations, inadequate compensation from former employees and multiple legal complaints over the layoffs.
The IT giant posted a revenue marginally above estimates on AI-driven demand earlier this week. Revenue from its key North America market registered growth for the first time in two years, while net profit dipped13.91% to Rs 10,657 crore after taking a one-time hit from the implementation of new labour codes.
‘Restructuring’ bid continues
“We continue to hire and seek top talent from both from the lateral market and the campuses. And while we are on that journey…what we had announced as part of the restructuring… we continue to look for support people with deployment in future role. And wherever we are not finding success…we are releasing. So we said we’ll continue this exercise till the end of this year. In this quarter as well, we released approximately 1000…800 people with all the due care and compliance with all the laws of the land. As communicated earlier, we expect it to continue into the next quarter as well,” Kunnumal said during the earnings call.
The top official added that there was no defined number that it was following — insisting that the company released people only upon review if there was a “genuine reason”. TCS had previously announced plans to lay off around 12,000 people earlier in the year as part of a restructuring exercise. It reported a reduction of 19,755 in the overall staff during the September quarter, but hinted that only 6,000 of these were involuntary actions because of the restructuring exercise.
Steady fall in headcount
TCS reported a closing headcount of 582,163 people during Q3FY26 while voluntary LTM attrition stood at 13.5% in IT services. According to data released by the company in its latest eanings presentation, the total employee base has fallen sharply from 613,069 people in Q1FY26 to 593,314 in the second quarter. It dropped further to 582,163 people during the recently ended third quarter.
“We estimate it to be approximately 2%. We are currently at 1%, and we will continue to evaluate people whom we can redeploy. The ones we are not able to re-deploy; those are the people that we will release,” VP Sudeep Kunnumal had said during an earnings call in mid-October last year.