On JPMorgan Chase's quarterly earnings call last month, CEO Jamie Dimon said the banking environment is "getting close to as good as it gets."
With consumers in solid shape, investors piling into stock market bets, companies calling on investment bankers, and spenders paying up for credit card perks, the firm notched record revenue in its three major divisions last quarter. The market is thrilled: JPMorgan's stock has hit 17 new all-time highs this year.
The bank is still laying off hundreds of employees.
The country's largest lender filed six layoff notices with regulators between February and July, impacting 774 employees in Texas, New Jersey, and California.
It's the highest total since 2015, according to an analysis of public records by WARN Database. That year, JPMorgan's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings, or WARN notices, showed 1,040 employees laid off as the bank retooled its branch strategy and looked to cut costs. JPMorgan also laid off employees throughout 2025.
The latest layoffs have come across JPMorgan's consumer banking, commercial and investment banking, and technology units, people familiar with the matter said. They have affected various levels of workers.
"This is part of our regular management of the business," a JPMorgan spokesman said. "We regularly review our business needs and adjust our staffing accordingly-creating new roles where we see the need or reducing positions when appropriate."
The spokesman added, "Our strategy has not changed, and we run the company to invest through the cycle. We continue to hire in many other areas and always work hard to redeploy impacted employees."
The 774 employees referenced in WARN notices this year represent less than 1% of JPMorgan's 320,560 employees. The total number of people losing their jobs is likely higher, however, because federal laws generally don't require companies to report smaller-scale layoffs.
The spokesman said an increase in layoff notices in New Jersey is tied to recent changes to the state's WARN Act, which now requires notifications for layoffs impacting more than 50 employees.
The bank filed the WARN notice in Texas, the spokesman said, because it "consolidated a small operations team in Plano to larger existing operations locations." In California, JPMorgan's notice "was filed mainly due to small heritage First Republic team in San Francisco that we consolidated into our larger existing corporate centers."
JPMorgan has still grown its overall employee base significantly. It has added more than 60,000 employees in five years, Dimon told investors this past May. The bank has a combined 1,700, open positions in New Jersey, Plano, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Banks across Wall Street and Main Street are laying off employees as they try to keep a lid on expenses and find new uses for artificial intelligence, prompting management teams to rethink jobs and systems. JPMorgan's layoffs are notable, though, because JPMorgan has turned in blockbuster financial results.
For some employees, the layoffs have caused a sense of anxiety and confusion. In the bank's latest annual employee opinion survey, 73% of employees said they view their health and well-being as a priority for JPMorgan. It was the lowest score in the 20-question survey.
Questions asking whether teams maintain proper controls, and whether inappropriate behavior isn't tolerated on employees' teams, were the highest-scoring firmwide at 92% and 93%, respectively.
New questions in this year's survey underscore, in part, leadership's efforts to understand how people are using AI in their work, according to a copy of the survey results reviewed by Barron's.
The bank asked whether employees feel their work is meaningful (85% said yes) whether decisions on their teams are made in a timely manner (79%), and if AI tools are allowing them to work more efficiently (78%).
"We are preparing to make sure we can retrain our people, and we have had discrete areas where we did reduce jobs by 30% or 40%. Most of those people were offered jobs elsewhere," Dimon said in July.
Dimon was responding to a question from Saul Martinez, an HSBC research analyst, who cited the recent mass layoffs at Block due to AI while noting the sensitivity surrounding the issue of AI and jobs.
"It's not a sensitive topic at all," Dimon said. "We are going to use AI to do a better job for clients. That's our job. We fully expect it'll have huge efficiency in certain parts of the company."
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