The tech layoffs 2026 market asks one blunt question: will the information sector shed more workers in 2026 than it did in 2025? It is a binary Yes/No contract tied to federal labor data, not a headline tally from any private tracker. The board carries roughly $31.4M in cumulative volume and resolves in early 2027 once full-year 2026 figures finalize. The live board above ranks the current cross-platform price; the body here covers what the question measures and how it settles.
The tech layoffs 2026 contract distills a year of churn into a single comparison. It does not ask how many people lost jobs at any one company, or whether a specific name like Meta or Amazon ran another round. It asks whether the information sector as a whole, as the federal government counts it, lays off more workers across all of 2026 than it did across all of 2025. One number against another number. Yes or No.
That framing matters because the headline-grabbing private trackers and the official data tell different stories. A site that aggregates announced cuts captures press releases. The federal series captures the actual flow of separations across thousands of employers, reported monthly and revised over time. This market settles on the official series, which is why a loud quarter of announcements does not automatically push it to Yes.
The information sector is a specific federal classification. It bundles software publishers, data processing and hosting, telecom, broadcasting, and web search and publishing into one bucket. When people say tech layoffs, they usually mean a subset of this, but the contract resolves on the full sector count, so a wave concentrated in software still has to move the whole bucket to matter.
The core tension the price reflects is base-rate versus momentum. The 2025 figure is the bar to clear, and it is already a known, finalized number by the time this resolves. The open question is 2026: whether the pace of separations across the sector runs hotter or cooler than the prior year. A year-over-year comparison is sensitive to timing. A sector can feel calmer in the headlines while still posting a higher annual separation count if cuts are spread thin across many employers rather than concentrated in a few splashy rounds.
This is also why automation and cost-discipline narratives do not map cleanly onto the contract. A company can replace roles with software and still show up as separations in the data, which pushes toward Yes. A company can also slow hiring without cutting, which does nothing to the layoff count at all. The market is measuring one specific flow, not the general mood of the industry. Read the question literally and the price makes more sense than the discourse around it.
The tech layoffs 2026 market resolves in early 2027, with a resolution date of March 1, 2027. It settles to Yes if the full-year 2026 information-sector layoff total, as measured by the official federal labor series the contract specifies, exceeds the 2025 total. It settles to No if the 2026 total comes in at or below the 2025 figure. Because federal labor data is reported monthly and revised, the contract waits until the full annual count is final rather than calling it on a partial-year pace. The resolution source is the government data series named in the contract terms on Kalshi, not a private aggregator or a press tally.
Labor-market stress rarely shows up in isolation, so this contract sits next to the broader economic board. For the recession question that often moves in the same direction, see the Recession this year odds, and for the sector-specific downturn angle compare the AI Industry Downturn 2026 market. Both trade alongside this one in the economics prediction markets hub, where the full slate of labor, rate, and growth contracts lives. The page is maintained by the Genius Staff desk, which tracks the underlying federal data series and refreshes the resolution detail as the schedule firms up. For the current cross-platform price on this specific contract, the live board above is the source of truth.
Resolves on March 1, 2027. The contract settles to Yes if the full-year 2026 information-sector layoff total, as measured by the official federal labor data series named in the Kalshi contract terms, exceeds the 2025 information-sector total. It settles to No if the 2026 figure comes in at or below the 2025 figure. The source of truth is the government data series specified on Kalshi, not a private tracker such as a layoffs aggregator or a press-release tally. Because the underlying monthly data is revised after initial release, the market waits for the finalized full-year count rather than resolving on a partial-year pace. Each share pays $1 on the correct side and $0 on the other; if the underlying data series is discontinued or restated in a way that prevents a clean comparison, the contract resolves per Kalshi's published edge-case rules.
The contract trades on Kalshi with roughly $31.4M in cumulative volume across the board. It is currently a Kalshi-only market with no Polymarket pairing. The live board above shows the up-to-the-minute Yes and No price.
It resolves on March 1, 2027, once the full-year 2026 information-sector labor data is finalized. It settles Yes if 2026 layoffs in the sector exceed the 2025 total, and No if they come in at or below it.
The contract is listed on Kalshi under the layoffs information-sector series. There is no Polymarket counterpart at this time, so there is no cross-platform spread to arbitrage on this specific question yet.
It measures the official federal information-sector layoff count for all of 2026 against the 2025 count, not a private tracker like a layoffs aggregator. The sector includes software, telecom, data hosting, and broadcasting, so the full bucket must move, not just one company.
Watch the monthly federal data and its revisions through the 2026 calendar year, the macro rate path, and whether cuts are broad across many employers or concentrated in a few headline rounds. A late data revision can flip a close comparison near the March 2027 resolution.