Laid off from Visa: what to do now

Last updated August 19, 2026

On July 28, 2026, Visa CEO Ryan McInerney told staff the company was eliminating roughly 2,600 positions, about 7% of a workforce of around 34,100. The cuts land mainly on technology and product teams.

A lot of the people reading this are further along than most layoff pages assume. WARN notices filed on July 31 name October 1, 2026 as the effective date for 320 positions in Foster City and 70 in Bellevue, and the filings list directors, lead engineers, senior directors, architects and vice presidents. If that is your situation, you are not figuring out what happened. You are deciding what to do with the weeks in between. There is also an open law firm investigation into the Foster City notice, covered in the questions below, which is worth knowing about whether or not it turns out to matter to you.

What is actually confirmed

The company-wide number is about 2,600 roles, roughly 7% of a workforce of around 34,100, announced in a staff memo on July 28, 2026. Bloomberg reported it first and the figures have been carried consistently since. On who: the cuts fall primarily on technology and product teams. There is no public breakdown by country, office or level beyond the WARN filings, so if you are trying to work out how deep it went in your own org, that number has not been published.

The WARN filings are the concrete part. A California notice filed July 31, 2026 covers 320 positions at Foster City with an effective date of October 1, 2026, and reporting on the filing describes it as reaching six vice presidents, thirty-seven senior directors and sixteen chief engineering and architect positions. A Washington notice with the same dates covers 70 positions in downtown Bellevue, including directors, lead engineers and two vice presidents. Between them that is 390 of the 2,600, so most of the round sits outside WARN reporting entirely.

Two dates worth having in front of you, and nothing read into them here: the notices were filed on July 31, 2026 and they name October 1, 2026 as the effective date. What your own paperwork says, and whether it matches that, is a question for your agreement and for someone qualified to read it in your state.

What is knowable about the market you are entering

Nobody has published where Visa alumni are landing. The round is three weeks old, no tracker exists for it, and any page telling you which companies are hiring Visa people right now is inventing it. So this section is short on purpose.

What is on the record is the seniority. Reporting on the Foster City filing counts six vice presidents, thirty-seven senior directors and sixteen chief engineering and architect positions, and Bellevue reaches directors, lead engineers and two vice presidents. Nobody has published how the remaining positions break down by level, so the honest figure is that at least fifty-nine of them are senior, not that most of them are.

Our read, and it is a read rather than a finding: the timing of when you start matters more here than it usually does, because a defined end date means a defined date when a lot of similar resumes arrive at once. We have not measured that and we are not going to pretend we have.

Using the notice period

The why-did-you-leave question has a two-sentence answer. Visa cut about 2,600 roles, roughly 7% of the company, mostly in technology and product, and your role was in it. That is the whole answer, and at your level the person across the table has almost certainly either run one of these or been in one.

The part that is genuinely worth the weeks is translation. A resume written inside one company for a long stretch carries internal team names, internal tooling, an internal levelling vocabulary, and product names that mean nothing outside the building. That is not a criticism of the resume, it is what happens to everyone who does good work in one place for years, and it is invisible from the inside. If any part of your search runs through an online application rather than a search firm or a referral, the file is also getting converted to plain text before a person reads it, and an internal structure quietly becomes a gap at that step.

The other thing a notice period is unusually good for is the reps. Answers that are completely clear in your head come out differently the first time you say them to another person, and if it has been a few years since you last interviewed, that gap is wider than it feels.

If you want a second opinion on how that resume reads after the translation pass, there is a free checker here that shows you what a parser does to your file. No account needed, and the file never leaves your computer. Run the free resume check

Severance and unemployment questions

How many people did Visa lay off?

About 2,600 roles, roughly 7% of a workforce of around 34,100, announced on July 28, 2026, falling primarily on technology and product teams.

The only location-level figures in the public record come from WARN notices filed July 31, 2026, both naming October 1, 2026 as the effective date: 320 positions at Foster City, California, and 70 in downtown Bellevue, Washington. Those account for 390 of the 2,600, so most of the round has no published breakdown.

Was this about AI?

Partly, in the company's own words. McInerney's memo says AI "is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa," and describes reorganising product development teams that used to be ten or more people into smaller groups of two to four. Most of the coverage led with that framing because the memo did.

That matters for how you answer the question in an interview, and the useful version is narrower than the headline. Your team was restructured and your role was eliminated in a round that cut 7% of the company. You do not need to characterise what a tool can or cannot do to explain why you are looking, and a candidate who does usually ends up defending a claim about the industry rather than talking about their own work.

What severance is Visa offering?

No severance terms for this round have been made public, and this page is not going to guess at them. What was reported about a different company in a different round tells you nothing reliable about your own agreement.

Read your actual paperwork before you sign it, and if the amounts are meaningful to you, have someone qualified read it too. That is worth doing regardless of what any page on the internet says the standard terms are.

My last day is October 1. When should I start?

Sooner rather than on October 2, and the reason is specific to this round rather than general advice. Several hundred people with the same employer name and the same end date are looking at the same time, so there is a version of this where a lot of similar applications arrive in the same week. Ours is a read rather than a measurement, and it costs nothing to act on.

A notice period is also the best window you will get for the unglamorous work: getting the resume out of internal language, writing down the stories you will be asked for, and working out which parts of what you built translate to people who have never used your internal tools.

A law firm is investigating the WARN notices. What does that mean?

Strauss Borrelli PLLC published an investigation on August 4, 2026 into what it calls "its recent potential mass layoff in Foster City, California," referencing the July 31, 2026 notice covering 320 employees, and says affected employees "may be entitled to 60 days of severance pay and benefits."

That is a firm stating what it is looking into, and it is not a finding that anything was done wrong. Nobody has ruled on it. The reason it is on this page at all is that you might be one of the 320 and would probably rather know the investigation exists than not.

Whether it applies to you depends on your own notice, your own agreement, and your own state, none of which a page can tell you. If it matters to you, that is a conversation with an employment lawyer rather than a search result.

What about unemployment, health coverage, and the notice period?

These are the questions where a general answer on a web page is worth the least, because the rules differ by state and by plan, and because your own paperwork governs. We are not going to summarise them for you and get one of them subtly wrong.

Two things worth doing rather than reading about. Contact your state unemployment office directly about timing rather than working from what someone said online, since the rules on when to file and how any payment interacts with benefits are state-specific. And if anything about your notice, your agreement, or your benefits looks off to you, that is a conversation with an employment lawyer in your state, not a search result.

More that helps

Sources

If your last day is October 1, you have a defined runway and a lot to get done inside it. PrepVault keeps roles, notes and prep in one place so week six does not start from a blank page. Built by a laid-off engineer running his own search with it. Start free with PrepVault