UPS plans to hire 100,000 seasonal workers for the 2026 holiday season to sort, process and deliver packages. That’s about 9% fewer than last year and 20% fewer than in 2024, Reuters reported.
UPS has also added or upgraded automated buildings in Denver, St. Paul, Syracuse and Portland. It says applicants can receive job offers in “less than seven minutes”. Its new Protected Delivery service requires recipients to provide a PIN before drivers release eligible high-value packages.
The seasonal hiring comes as UPS scales back its permanent workforce and reduces shipments for Amazon, its largest customer. In January, the carrier said it would cut up to 30,000 operational jobs and close 24 facilities this year. The cuts are expected to come through attrition and another driver buyout, with no layoffs planned, according to Reuters. UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs in 2025.
Automation is taking on a larger share of the work. At the end of Q2, 68.5% of UPS’s US volume moved through automated buildings, up from 64% a year earlier, CEO Carol Tomé said in July. She said the cost per package at an automated building is about 28% lower.
Retailers are also pulling back on seasonal hiring. Challenger, Gray & Christmas expects retailers to add about 450,000 seasonal jobs in the fourth quarter, down 2.5% from 461,500 last year, per Retail Dive. “It’s more about restocking staffing plans surgically than a return to the 900,000-plus seasonal hiring years we saw in 2020 and 2021,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer.
