REDMOND — Microsoft offered voluntary exit packages on Monday to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its global workforce, in the widest buyout the company has ever put on the table.

The programme, which Microsoft calls the Voluntary Exit Offer, covers eligible staff on participating teams in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India at the company's internal level 70 and below. Those who qualify were told they would receive the terms by email within hours of the announcement.

Nothing on this scale has been offered at Microsoft before, and it lands two days before the company reports quarterly results that investors will read for the cost of its artificial intelligence build-out. Microsoft counted 223,000 full-time employees on June 30, according to its annual filing, against 228,000 a year earlier. About 60,000 are eligible, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC, which put that at roughly 27 percent of the total.

"This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support," wrote Amy Coleman, Microsoft's executive vice president and chief people officer, in a memo the company also published on its corporate blog. It also gives participating organisations "another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs," she wrote.

What is on offer is the same deal Microsoft gives staff it lets go, the company told GeekWire: severance pay scaled to seniority and years served, stock that keeps vesting, a set period of health cover and help finding another job. Missing from it is the extended healthcare that drew many employees to the retirement scheme Microsoft ran earlier this year. Age, length of service and performance ratings play no part in who qualifies, the company said.

Employees have until the first week of December to decide. Those who accept will leave on December 31, CNBC reported, citing a person briefed on the plan.

Level 70 reaches higher into management than Microsoft has gone with a voluntary offer. GeekWire reported that it takes in general managers and some staff carrying vice-president titles, though not corporate vice presidents.

Not every part of the company is taking part. Microsoft has left each business leader to decide, and the sales organisation opted out, as did some engineering groups and corporate functions, according to GeekWire. CNBC reported that some marketing teams also stayed out. "There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee," Coleman wrote, adding that participation "varies based on each business's priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs."

The offer follows a retirement programme Microsoft introduced in April, the first of its kind in the 51-year-old company's history. Eligibility was confined to American staff at senior director level, 67 on the internal scale, and below, and required a minimum combined total of age and service. Roughly 8,750 people qualified, and more than 30 percent took it, Microsoft said in July. The company booked a $900 million charge for that programme in its April earnings report.

Microsoft told GeekWire that it expects a far lower acceptance rate this time, since the earlier deal was aimed at long-serving employees who had more reason to take it. The person briefed on the new plan told CNBC that the company has set no target.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the offer does not mean the company needs fewer people, calling it one of several ways Microsoft is responding to shifting business needs. The company also said the programme will not take the place of layoffs, which it will keep using as conditions warrant.

Those have come steadily. July brought 4,800 job cuts, about 2 percent of the global workforce, some 600 of them in Washington state, and further cuts ran into the hundreds in September. More than 15,000 jobs went in 2025. Coleman told GeekWire in July that staff leaving under the retirement offer had spared some of that month's layoffs.

Behind the cuts sits a spending commitment that has unsettled shareholders across the industry. In July, Microsoft guided to more than $50 billion of capital expenditure for the September quarter. The comparable figure a year earlier, including finance leases, was $34.9 billion, according to CNBC. The company rents out computing power to Anthropic, OpenAI and many other companies. CNBC reported that Microsoft generated positive free cash flow of $19.64 billion in the second quarter, 23 percent less than a year earlier, at a time when Alphabet and Amazon were both burning cash.

Buyouts are still rare at the top of the technology industry. Its biggest companies have mostly shed staff through layoffs, harsher performance reviews and orders to return to the office. Coleman said in July that Microsoft was looking at making voluntary departures a standing feature of how it manages headcount, perhaps yearly or continuously.

The company reported in July that more than 4,000 of its employees had switched to different jobs within Microsoft over the preceding year. Coleman wrote on Monday that it would keep helping people "build new skills and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft."

Microsoft reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday afternoon, when it may put a figure on what the new offer will cost.