The Trade Desk to cut 15% of staff, take up to $51 million in severance charges

The Trade Desk is eliminating roughly 15 per cent of its workforce and expects to take $39 million to $51 million in cash restructuring charges for severance and benefits, according to a Form 8-K reporting an event dated Sept. 3. The charges will be partly offset by a reversal of about $4 million to $5 million tied to stock-based compensation, and the company expects the realignment to be substantially completed during the third quarter of 2026.

The scale points to more than 500 roles. A February financial filing showed 3,843 full-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2025, which means the cut affects more than 500 staffers, Business Insider calculated. Adweek, working from a figure of about 3,900 employees, put it at roughly 585 jobs.

It moved fast. Chief executive Jeff Green announced the layoffs in an email to staff on Sept. 3, republished on The Current, the adtech news site the company owns. Affected employees left on Sept. 4, The Straits Times reported.

Retrenchment is “a common practice in big tech,” Green wrote, but “this has not been a common practice at TTD. We don’t expect it to become one.”

Business Insider reported there had been signs that The Trade Desk could be preparing to cut costs. Analysts at Evercore ISI published a note on Thursday recapping the firm’s “Rally in the Valley” bus tour in which The Trade Desk’s head of investor relations, Chris Roth, said the company had “never significantly pared back its cost structure” and that there were likely “significant opportunities to address,” according to Business Insider.

The backdrop is a company under sustained pressure. Second-quarter revenue grew 3 per cent year on year and earnings missed Wall Street expectations. Shares have fallen around 70 per cent over the past year and nearly 90 per cent from their late-2024 peak. “In the context of being one of the worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 for two years running, losing its entire C-level management team, and with expectations of 15% sales declines in 2H26, the head count cuts are no surprise,” Richard Kramer, an analyst at Arete Research, told Business Insider.

The management churn is its own workforce story. The Trade Desk has lost its chief financial officer, chief revenue officer, chief strategy officer, chief marketing officer and four board members, and has hired replacements for the CFO and CMO, along with a chief commercial officer and two new directors. A company replacing senior leadership while cutting 15 per cent of staff is rebuilding management and delivery capacity at the same time.

Singapore, the company’s APAC regional hub, is in the cut. LinkedIn indicates The Trade Desk has more than 140 employees there. Two people who identified themselves as Singapore staff posted publicly on Sept. 4 and 5 about being let go, one in creative strategy and operations after six years, one in client services who said she was made redundant on Sept. 4, according to The Straits Times.

Some of the affected Singapore roles included creative strategy and operations and client services, based on public LinkedIn posts cited by The Straits Times. Client services, account management and regional operations sit close to revenue, and in the weeks before the announcement the Singapore team was still recruiting: an account manager role covering agency partnerships across Singapore and Malaysia, and another to support the Philippines market, were both promoted on LinkedIn by Singapore-based directors in mid-2026. As at Sept. 7, a Singapore-based opening for a senior director of business development for Asia-Pacific remained live on the platform.

Green has framed the reorganisation as a structural change rather than a simple headcount reduction: “We want our teams to be organised into smaller pods and smaller scrums, but with greater focus.” He also told staff the company holds about $1.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments and carries no debt, which lets it keep investing in areas including artificial intelligence and media measurement.

The severance accrual lands in the third quarter. The company said it may incur further charges not currently contemplated if unanticipated events arise during implementation, and that it will file an amended report if the amounts differ materially from the estimates.