Oil and Gas Employment Hits a 2026 Low Even as Production Sets Records

Chevron is cutting up to 9,000 jobs this year. That's a fifth of its global workforce, gone, while it digests the $53 billion Hess deal. ExxonMobil trimmed 2,000 . BP shed more than 5 percent of its staff, plus 3,000 contractors . ConocoPhillips is cutting 20 to 25 percent . Imperial Oil is cutting a fifth of its people and shutting its Calgary office entirely. And in June, U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers , the second-lowest June the Bureau of Labor Statistics has on record, beaten only by the pandemic bottom of 2021.

Production didn't fall; it's near record highs…but the jobs are disappearing anyway.

And before anyone assumes it's renewable energy's fault…it isn't, not directly, at least. Nobody at Chevron got a pink slip because a wind farm opened next door. Automation, mergers, and a decade of investors who'd rather see returns than growth did this.

Back in January 2016, extraction employment topped out at 187,300 , right before the price crash gutted the sector…

A decade on, the workforce sits almost 40 percent below that number, even while wells across the Permian and Eagle Ford keep breaking output records. This year alone tells the story in miniature… 115,500 in January, a bump to 116,200 in February , then a slide every month after, down to 114,500 by June.

The May-to-June dip isn't even new. Extraction jobs have fallen in that exact window in 7 of the last 11 years . Call it seasonal if you want. The floor keeps dropping every year regardless.

One footnote worth knowing: these figures get revised constantly. May's number came in at 115,600 first, then got walked back to 115,300 a month later. Treat any single month less like gospel and more like a rough read on direction.

Extraction, though, is the smaller of the two numbers that matter here.

Oilfield services, the drilling contractors, completions crews, pressure pumpers, employs something like 627,000 people , more than five times the extraction headcount, and it's been losing jobs even faster.

The ripple effects run deep, too…every upstream job is estimated to support roughly 232,000 supply chain jobs and 421,000 more through spending, more than 850,000 positions riding on an industry that keeps figuring out how to need fewer people directly.

The productivity data backs this up. Output per hour jumped 11.4 percent in 2023 while labor input barely budged, and total factor productivity swung from a 14.7 percent drop in 2021 to a 30.2 percent gain two years later. Nobody's working harder out there. They're working with better tools, and fewer of them.

This year's layoff wave has less to do with oil prices than with a decade of mergers finally catching up.

Chevron's cuts, the largest in company history , are chasing $2 billion to $3 billion in savings from folding Hess into the existing operation.

"We do not take these actions lightly," a spokesperson said , which is the sort of thing companies always say.

BP is chasing a similar $2 billion target. ExxonMobil's cuts followed its own Pioneer deal.

Merge two companies, and merging their field offices comes next, whether or not a single well changes how it produces.

The services companies have a more familiar excuse…business has slowed.