Laid off from Global Payments.

What Global Payments layoffs have meant for employees

Each dollar figure in Global Payments' filings measures something different. The 2024 charge is the one its 2025 Form 10-K ties to actions aligning the workforce to a new operating model. The 2025 and 2026 amounts are earnings adjustments in its February 2026 results and August 2026 results, and both include discontinued operations, the classification the 10-K gives Issuer Solutions. Measured the same way in those releases, 2024's termination benefits ran about two and a half times 2025's. If you're trying to place a cut you lived through or heard about, these totals won't say how many people it reached or where.

The two earlier combinations on record don't rest on equally firm ground. The Heartland reductions come from Global Payments' own chief executive, who listed fewer positions and closed facilities among the first 90 days' objectives, Digital Transactions reported, while the Atlanta cuts at Worldpay were a plan that PaymentExpert relayed from other U.S. press, tied to Vantiv making its Cincinnati complex the operations center. If you're weighing what either says about the current integration, the first is the company's own account of what it did and the second is a secondhand report of what was planned.

The 2024 overhaul was built around structure. Global Payments set out to run as a single global operating company, putting its technology teams under common leadership and centralizing its operations functions, the 10-K says, and Wolfe Research analyst Darrin Peller suspected that, given its acquisitions and automation, the company had found overlapping roles. If you worked in technology or operations then, those are the two functions the 10-K names in describing the change.

The Worldpay purchase widened the overhaul. In its second-quarter 2026 10-Q, Global Payments said it had folded the Worldpay integration and its own transformation into one program, expected to run over the next few years with incremental expenses through 2028. Finance chief Josh Whipple said in May 2025 that a third of the planned savings would come from technology and vendors, a third from consolidating support structures, processing systems and facilities, and a third from eliminating duplicative administrative and corporate functions, Payments Dive reported. If your work at either company sits in support, administration or a corporate function both had, that's the share of the business the savings plan names.

For a year after the closing, Global Payments committed to keep the annualized base pay of each person on Worldpay's staff at the closing no lower than before the deal, under the purchase agreement it signed in April 2025. Their benefits, apart from equity, retention, pension and retiree health among others, were to stay substantially comparable overall, and staff under a Worldpay union contract were to keep that contract's terms instead. The agreement says that section is for the parties alone and gives employees no claim under it. If you were on Worldpay's staff at the closing and Global Payments moves you into a new role during that year, your pre-closing base pay is the number the agreement measured against.

The January 2026 deal also moved Issuer Solutions out of Global Payments and into FIS, which forecast $125 million in cost savings from absorbing the card-issuer business, including streamlining back-office functions and consolidating operations, Payments Dive reported. If your job was in Issuer Solutions, that business has belonged to FIS since then. At the end of 2025, with Issuer Solutions still counted, half of Global Payments' workforce was in the Americas, against about 60% two years earlier, and 28% was in Asia Pacific. If your job ends in Georgia, where Global Payments is based, or in Ohio, home to Cincinnati-based Worldpay, our Georgia and Ohio unemployment pages cover a claim there, as the California and Indiana pages do for the two states with the most filings in our tracker.

A sourced history of Global Payments layoffs

• January to June 2026, employee termination benefits recorded

  Global Payments' August 2026 results list $32.2 million in employee termination benefits for the first half of 2026 among earnings adjustments that include discontinued operations, beside $448.6 million in acquisition, integration and separation expenses.

• 2025, $32.6 million in termination benefits

  Global Payments' February 2026 results list $32.6 million in employee termination benefits and $19.3 million in facilities exit charges among 2025's earnings adjustments, which include discontinued operations; $24.5 million of the termination benefits fell in April to June, per its August 2026 results.

• 2024, Global Payments realigns its workforce

  Global Payments acted in 2024 to align its workforce to a new operating model and recognized employee termination benefits of $99.6 million, including $19.4 million of share-based compensation expense, according to its 2025 Form 10-K.

• September 2024, Global Payments cuts U.S. jobs

  Global Payments cut U.S. jobs in the weeks before mid-September 2024, Payments Dive reported, citing analysts and employees, on top of the 400 cuts Wolfe Research analyst Darrin Peller had estimated earlier that year.

• February 2019, Worldpay plans Atlanta operations hub cuts

  Worldpay, then owned by Vantiv, was set to cut 200 to 250 jobs at its Atlanta operations hub and had notified Georgia's labor department, PaymentExpert reported, citing U.S. business press, as Vantiv's Cincinnati complex became the operations center.

• November 2016, Vantiv plans to close its Louisville call center

  Vantiv told Kentucky it would close its Louisville call center by the end of March 2017 and lay off its 200 full-time employees, ATM Marketplace reported, citing Louisville Business First.

• July 2016, Global Payments cuts positions after the Heartland merger

  Chief executive Jeffrey Sloan said the first 90 days after the $4.3 billion Heartland merger included a reduction in positions and some facility closings, Digital Transactions reported. Global Payments then counted more than 8,500 employees, up from about 4,500 the previous December.

What to do if you're laid off from Global Payments

• File for unemployment in the state where you worked. Benefits run from your filing date, and severance usually doesn't block you. Global Payments's biggest hubs: Georgia, California, Indiana. Somewhere else? Every state is here.
• Apply for financial and hardship assistance. Unemployment supplements income, but food benefits, health coverage and utility help are often available as well. Here's some of what Global Payments's hub states run: Georgia, California, Indiana, and every other state is here.
• Mind the health insurance window. Losing coverage opens a 60-day special enrollment period, and an ACA plan usually beats unsubsidized COBRA. Compare your options before the employer coverage lapses, and read how the COBRA clocks run if you are weighing it seriously.
• Get your real runway number. Severance plus savings divided by reality. The calculator takes five minutes.
• Know which clocks are already running. Severance review windows, COBRA election, visa grace periods, and 401(k) rollovers all run on federal deadlines that started at termination. All five deadlines are here.