Cboe Global Markets will cut 20% of its workforce during 2026, according to Quartz, in one of the steepest single-year reductions disclosed by a major US exchange operator in recent years.

The layoffs, scheduled across the calendar year, would remove one in five jobs from the Chicago-based exchange group. Cboe runs four US options exchanges, a US futures market, an equities venue in Europe and an index-licensing business operated through long-standing joint ventures.

What is Cboe?

Cboe is best known as a venue operator, but the parent company sells connectivity, market-data feeds and volatility-index licensing as core revenue lines. The "exchange" label understates the breadth of a business that has spent the past decade positioning itself as a market-infrastructure supplier rather than a pure trading-floor operator.

How does a 20% cut compare?

Workforce reductions of this size at a publicly traded exchange operator are unusual. Public commentary and analyst coverage shows that venue operators typically trim single-digit percentages of staff in lean periods, rather than 20% over a single calendar year. Cboe's target outpaces that pattern, which is what draws attention to the headline number.

What does a 20% reduction imply?

A cut of this scale touches every operating unit, including market operations, technology, sales and back-office functions. The figure is large enough to require corporate-level sign-off and a restructuring charge that would surface in Cboe's filings.

Severance accounting and program costs typically run as a separate line item. A 20% workforce reduction in one year would almost certainly produce a meaningful one-time charge against 2026 earnings.

Function-by-function decisions typically follow a board-approved budget cycle. Engineering and data teams — the fastest-growing headcount categories across the sector in recent years — are common targets. So too are middle-management layers that grow during acquisition integrations. For Cboe specifically, that calculus matters: the group has marketed itself as a technology-led venue operator with proprietary platforms handling routing, risk and analytics.

Why cut in 2026?

The year matters. Exchange operators have spent two years digesting compressed equities-trading economics, lower realized volatility and rising infrastructure costs tied to cloud migration. A 2026 cut would let Cboe book the savings into results the following year, when broader expense pressure on the industry is expected to continue.

Cutting through 2026 also keeps the heaviest restructuring expenses contained to the current reporting calendar. Severance payments, facility consolidations and systems-migration costs normally flow through quarterly results in the year of the action, depressing short-term earnings but lifting forward-year operating margins.

The timing lines up with the post-acquisition digestion phase. Cutting now would let management reset the cost base ahead of further product launches in 2027.

What details remain unclear?

The Quartz report does not break out severance accounting, geographic allocation or function-level cuts. It also does not state whether the program covers full-time employees only, or extends to contractors and contract staff.

Investors will look for those specifics when Cboe files its next quarterly results and lays out 2026 operating-expense guidance. For now, the 20% headline is the load-bearing fact.