BMW has temporarily closed the employee portal handling its voluntary severance program after applications overwhelmed the system, according to reporting by BILD. The Munich-based automaker intends to cut as many as 8,000 positions worldwide, with the majority of those losses falling in Germany, and had invited staff to request an individual buyout calculation in recent days.
BILD reports that interest was so heavy the internal portal at times became completely overloaded, forcing the company to stop accepting new requests while it processes the applications already submitted. A BMW spokesperson confirmed the strong demand but declined to provide further details, the outlet said. Internally, the situation is said to have caused considerable unease.
Why it matters
The scale of the response points to a striking imbalance. While much of the auto industry is searching for ways to trim costs, BMW appears to face the opposite problem: more employees want to leave than the company anticipated. That dynamic shapes both the cost and the pace of the restructuring, and it gives staff unusual leverage in deciding who departs and on what terms.
The program also carries a substantial price tag. BMW has budgeted costs in the triple-digit millions for the job reduction, but BILD, citing information from internal circles, reports the actual figure is far higher — around one billion euros earmarked for 2026, with even more money expected to flow in 2027. The company expects the outlay to pay off over time, projecting annual savings of roughly one billion euros from 2028 onward, according to corporate statements cited by BILD.
What employees stand to receive
According to BILD, citing internal sources, older staff with long tenures could receive roughly 50,000 euros for each year of service. Someone with twelve years at the company could therefore collect around 600,000 euros. BMW has not disclosed how the buyouts are calculated. The only certainty is that income, age and length of service all play a significant role.
Roughly 50,000 of BMW's approximately 84,000 employees in Germany were invited to have an offer calculated, BILD reports. The automaker has kept the formula behind those figures confidential.
Where the cuts are landing
The administrative and research and development divisions are among the hardest hit, according to the report. BILD learned that an entire department within the group's autonomous driving unit — known internally under the designation "Radar," referring to finished sensors — accepted the severance offer. Whether the company approved that outcome remains unclear. BMW did not respond to a short-notice BILD inquiry on the matter.
The automaker is also increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to make workflows more efficient, and demand for development work appears to be declining following the ramp-up of its new "Neue Klasse" model generation, BILD reports.
What happens next depends on how quickly BMW works through the backlog of applications and whether it reopens the portal. Watch for the company to clarify how many departures it will actually accept, and whether the one billion euros budgeted for 2026 proves sufficient.
