Microsoft will require employees to work in the office three days per week next year, a major shift for one of the last remote-work-friendly tech giants.
The policy will take effect Feb. 23 for workers living within 50 miles of a Microsoft office in the Puget Sound region, Microsoft's chief human resources officer, Amy Coleman, said Tuesday in an internal memo viewed by The Seattle Times.
The return-to-office edict will eventually roll out to employees in other U.S. offices and to those based internationally. There's no set timeline for those employees yet.
We've looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results, Coleman wrote.
Employees at the coding platform GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary, will stay remote, according to a separate internal memo.
Microsoft's policy shift establishes a harder line than the company had previously taken toward in-person work. Coming out of the pandemic, Microsoft laid out a hybrid work model with expectations some workers would come in about 50% of the time, depending on the role. The company tracked badge-in data but there was no companywide mandate or enforcement of in-office attendance.
Microsoft will make remote-work exceptions for some employees, with requests for exemptions due on Sept. 19.
Companies like Seattle-based Amazon and Meta drew up RTO policies in 2023, requiring workers to come in three days per week. Amazon ratcheted it up at the beginning of 2025 with a five-day policy.
When companies first started bringing workers back, employees mused on social media and in online forums that RTO policies were a way of increasing attrition. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy addressed those rumors last year in an all-hands meeting saying the five-day policy was not a “backdoor layoff.”
Coleman in her memo on Tuesday also pushed back on any notion that Microsoft was using a stricter RTO policy to trim its workforce.
“Importantly, this update is not about reducing head count,” she wrote. “It’s about working together in a way that enables us to meet our customers’ needs.”
Microsoft has already laid off more than 15,000 employees this year in a series of layoffs that began in May, with more than 3,200 local workers affected. The company’s latest cuts included 42 Seattle-area employees on Monday. That’s on top of the 3,199 employees the company laid off in 2023, part of industrywide cuts that affected workers at Amazon, Meta, Google and other tech firms.
As part of the update, the company will be enhancing workplace safety and security measures, Coleman also wrote. Her comment came a week after Microsoft tightened security and limited access to several buildings, following pro-Palestinian protests that culminated in demonstrators participating in a sit-in in Microsoft President Brad Smith’s office, according to an email viewed by The Seattle Times.
Employees will return to a corporate campus that’s gone through significant changes since workers were sent home at the beginning of the pandemic. Much of Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar campus renovation has been completed, though construction has slowed in the past few years.
Despite mass layoffs in 2023 and 2025, Microsoft’s local employment is relatively the same as it was in 2020. As of June, the company had 52,900 Seattle-area employees, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. That’s about 1,400 fewer than Microsoft had in May 2020.
In that time, Microsoft has jettisoned multiple offices from its portfolio in Bellevue and the Eastside suburbs. In downtown Bellevue alone, Microsoft has since 2023 left behind almost 2 million square feet of office space that once held more than 9,000 employees, according to city data.
Microsoft has until February to sort out space issues, which have cropped up over the past year as the company’s campus filled up with more workers opting for the office.
But if the company needs to stuff workers into more offices, it has options. Much of the space it left recently is still vacant.
Microsoft declined to comment on whether it would take back some of its previous office space.
Microsoft also took the 500,000-square-foot Millennium Corporate Park office space in Redmond that it was offering for sublease off the market, according to commercial real estate sources who asked not to be named to protect business relationships.
“If Microsoft wants to reoccupy some offices they have options,” said Clayton Holm, a commercial real estate broker for The Broderick Group. “A project like Millennium Corporate makes the most sense — it’s an affordable campus. But it’s too early to tell if they’ll grab other spaces, it’s not even known the capacity they have on campus.”
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