We’re not even through August and 2026 has already beaten 2025. Layoffs.fyi confirmed on August 6 that tech-sector layoffs this year have hit 125,759 employees across 264 companies — more than the 122,606 people laid off across all of 2025, and there are still five months left on the calendar. Fewer companies are doing the cutting. The cuts themselves are bigger.

The week that pushed the number over the line wasn’t quiet. Zillow cut just over 500 employees, about 7% of its staff, its second round this year. TikTok laid off its entire 250-person Nashville office and shut the location down. And Intuit — the company behind TurboTax and Credit Karma, tools we cover on this site regularly — cut about 3,000 roles, roughly 17% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring the internal memo linked to AI-focused priorities — though CEO Sasan Goodarzi later told CNBC the cuts had “nothing to do with AI” and were about becoming more effective.

One day later, the July jobs report landed and made the picture worse, not better. Employers unexpectedly shed 23,000 jobs — economists had forecast a gain of roughly 83,000 — and May and June’s numbers got revised down by a combined 103,000. Labor force participation fell to 61.4%, the lowest in more than five years. Unemployment actually ticked down to 4.1%, but that’s partly because fewer people are looking for work at all, which isn’t the good sign it sounds like.

If you’ve been laid off, or you’re reading this because you think you might be next, none of the “why” matters as much as the “now what.” This site has covered recession-proofing your budget before. We haven’t covered what to actually do with your money in the two weeks right after the job disappears. That’s this post.

Quick Take: Your First Two Weeks

Do This	By When	Why It Matters
File for unemployment	Day 1–2	Benefits aren’t retroactive to your filing delay in most states — every day you wait is money you don’t get back
Decide COBRA vs. marketplace	Within 60 days (COBRA election window)	COBRA keeps your exact plan but costs full price; a marketplace plan may be cheaper with a subsidy
Cut discretionary spending	Week 1	Every subscription and non-essential category becomes a decision, not a default
Leave retirement accounts alone	Ongoing	Early 401(k) withdrawals cost you a 10% penalty plus income tax — treat it as the last resort, not the first
Read your severance agreement fully	Before signing anything	Non-competes, release-of-claims language, and payout timing are all negotiable more often than people assume

What’s Actually Happening in Tech Layoffs Right Now

The scale here is worth sitting with for a second. 125,759 people is more than the population of a mid-size American city, cut from tech payrolls in a little over seven months. IBTimes’ rundown of the week’s cuts also names Etsy and Google adding to the count in the same stretch as Zillow and TikTok.

Intuit’s cut is the one that lands closest to home for readers of this site. We’ve written about how Intuit and Anthropic are integrating Claude into TurboTax, Credit Karma, and QuickBooks — and the restructuring behind the 3,000 job cuts is a genuinely contested story: the internal memo framed it around AI-focused priorities, but Goodarzi pushed back on that read on CNBC, saying the cuts were about reducing management layers and duplication after the Credit Karma/TurboTax integration, not about AI. Affected US employees exit July 31 with severance of 16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year of tenure, which is a genuinely strong package as these things go. Most companies cutting staff right now aren’t offering anything close to that, which is exactly why you can’t assume your own severance terms match what you read about in a press release for a different company.

Zillow’s round is smaller in absolute numbers but tells a similar story: a company citing a flat market, not a crisis, and still cutting 7% of staff a day ahead of earnings. TikTok’s Nashville closure hit its content-moderation team specifically — a detail worth noting if you’re in a role that AI tools are increasingly positioned to absorb.

Why the Jobs Report Made This Feel Bigger

A bad month in tech layoffs is one thing. A bad month in tech layoffs landing the same week the broader economy posts a surprise net job loss is another. The July employment report wasn’t just soft — it reversed. Economists expected growth. They got a 23,000-job contraction, plus a 103,000-job downward revision to the two months before it. That’s not noise. That’s a trend line that had been quietly worse than reported for two straight months before anyone noticed.

The 61.4% labor force participation rate — a 5.5-year low — is the number that should worry you more than the headline unemployment rate. Unemployment dropping to 4.1% sounds like good news until you realize part of the reason is that people are giving up the job search entirely, which removes them from the count without them finding work. If you’re laid off into a market like this, the “I’ll have something lined up in a few weeks” assumption deserves more scrutiny than it would in a tighter labor market.

What Should You Do in the First Two Weeks After a Layoff?

1. File for unemployment insurance immediately — the same day if you can. Most states don’t backdate benefits to cover the days you waited to file, and processing already takes one to three weeks in a normal month. In a month with 23,000 more people newly unemployed, don’t assume “normal.”
2. Decide on health insurance before your coverage lapses. You have 60 days to elect COBRA, but that clock starts at your qualifying event, not whenever you get around to deciding. Compare the COBRA premium (usually 100% of the full plan cost, sometimes plus a 2% admin fee) against a Healthcare.gov marketplace plan, where a layoff triggers a special enrollment period and you may qualify for a subsidy based on your now-lower income.
3. Pull every recurring charge into one place and cut what isn’t essential. This is the moment a recession-proofing budgeting app earns its subscription fee — or the moment you realize the subscription fee itself is one of the line items to cut.
4. Check your emergency fund balance against your actual monthly burn, not your old budget. If you don’t have one built yet, start with $1,000 before you touch anything else.
5. Leave retirement accounts alone unless every other option is exhausted. A 401(k) withdrawal before 59½ costs a 10% penalty on top of ordinary income tax — real money, not a rounding error, on money you’ll need decades from now.
6. Read the severance agreement in full before signing. Look specifically at the release-of-claims language, any non-compete or non-solicit clause, and whether the payout comes as a lump sum or salary continuation — the difference affects both your cash flow and your unemployment eligibility in some states.
7. Update your budget for zero income, not reduced income, until unemployment benefits actually hit your account. The gap between your last paycheck and your first benefit deposit is where people get caught off guard.

The Health Insurance Decision, Slower

COBRA and a marketplace plan solve the same problem in different ways, and the math genuinely varies by household. COBRA keeps you on the exact plan you already had — same doctors, same deductible progress for the year — but you’re now paying the full premium your employer used to subsidize, sometimes $600–$1,800/month for a family plan depending on your former employer’s plan. A marketplace plan resets your deductible and may mean switching doctors, but with your income now at $0 or close to it, the subsidy calculation can bring the premium down substantially, in some cases close to free for a bronze or silver tier plan.

Run both numbers against your actual expected medical needs before defaulting to either. If you’re mid-treatment for something and your specialist is only in-network on your old plan, COBRA’s higher cost might still be the right call. If you’re healthy and the family plan was expensive, the marketplace is worth ten minutes on Healthcare.gov before you assume COBRA is the default.

Budgeting for Zero Income (Not Reduced Income)

The instinct after a layoff is to treat the household budget like belt-tightening — cut the streaming services, eat out less, keep the rest running close to normal. That instinct is wrong for the first few weeks, specifically because you don’t know yet exactly when money starts coming back in.

Build the budget assuming unemployment benefits take three weeks to arrive and severance (if any) is the only cushion until they do. Every category gets re-evaluated, not just the obviously discretionary ones. This is a harder, more thorough version of the recession-proofing budgeting comparison we published earlier this year — the same apps apply, but the level of scrutiny is different. Zero-based tools like YNAB force you to account for every dollar before you spend it, which is uncomfortable and exactly the point when your income just went to zero. If automating your savings was your system before the layoff, pause the automatic transfers now — don’t let a scheduled savings withdrawal overdraft an account that’s no longer getting refilled the same way.

Protect Your Credit While You’re At It

A layoff is also a reasonable moment to check your credit report and monitor for anything unusual, especially if your old employer’s benefits or payroll systems were affected by the same restructuring that cut your job. Credit Karma and Experian both offer free monitoring — Credit Karma pulls from TransUnion and Equifax, Experian from its own bureau — and either is enough to catch new accounts opened in your name or a sudden score drop you didn’t cause. This isn’t the moment to open new credit to bridge the gap without thinking it through first; a maxed-out card compounds a bad month into a bad year.

What a Good Severance Package Actually Looks Like

Intuit’s package — 16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks per year of tenure — is a useful benchmark precisely because it’s public and specific. Someone with five years at the company gets 26 weeks of pay, more than six months of runway. That’s generous. Most companies cutting staff in 2026 aren’t matching it, and there’s no rule requiring severance at all in most states unless it’s in your original offer letter or a company policy document.

If you’re offered severance, read whether it’s a lump sum (better for you if you plan to negotiate the release terms, since a lump sum is harder for a company to walk back once it’s in your account) or salary continuation (which sometimes comes with a “look for other income” reporting requirement that a lump sum doesn’t). And don’t assume the first offer is final. Severance terms, especially around the release-of-claims language and any non-compete, are negotiated more often than people expect — you generally lose nothing by asking, and companies budget for some number of employees pushing back.

Who Should Worry Least Right Now

If you’re in health care, which the July jobs report specifically flagged as still adding workers while retail, local government education, and financial activities shed jobs, or you’re not in a tech role directly exposed to the AI-driven restructuring wave hitting Intuit and similar companies, the current numbers are a warning sign for the broader economy, not necessarily a personal one. Build the emergency fund anyway. A slowing labor market with falling participation is a bad time to be caught without a cushion, even in a field that’s holding up.

What No Financial Checklist Can Fix

None of this — filing on day one, choosing the right health plan, cutting the budget to zero-based — replaces income. A checklist buys you time and stops you from making the layoff financially worse than it has to be. It doesn’t get you rehired, and it doesn’t change a labor market where participation just hit a 5.5-year low and two straight months of job growth turned out to be smaller than reported.

Do the checklist anyway. The alternative — figuring out COBRA deadlines and unemployment filing rules for the first time while also panicking about rent — is worse.

The Bottom Line

2026 has already produced more tech layoffs than all of 2025, and the July jobs report showed the damage isn’t contained to tech. If you’ve just been laid off: file for unemployment today, decide on health coverage before the 60-day COBRA window pressures you into the default option, rebuild your budget around zero income until benefits actually land, and leave your retirement accounts alone. The market is worse than it was six months ago. Your response to a layoff in it shouldn’t be improvised.

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Layoff figures from Layoffs.fyi, IBTimes, Fast Company, and TechCrunch, current as of August 6–7, 2026. Intuit severance details via Yahoo Finance. July jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and NBC News. Unemployment and COBRA rules vary by state and employer — verify your specific timelines before acting.