Home Depot is cutting 800 corporate roles and ending remote work for its office staff, a one-two move that reshapes life for hundreds of white-collar employees at the home improvement giant. The company is telling corporate workers they must be in the office five days a week, even as it trims jobs that are heavily concentrated among remote positions. Together, the decisions signal a sharp turn in how one of the country’s largest retailers wants its headquarters to operate.
The cuts are relatively small compared with Home Depot’s vast workforce, but they land at a sensitive moment for knowledge workers who had come to see hybrid schedules as permanent. They also arrive as the housing market cools and big employers across the economy reassess how many people they need in back-office roles.
What Home Depot is changing and who is affected
Home Depot has told employees it will eliminate about 800 corporate jobs tied to its headquarters operations while simultaneously requiring office staff to work on-site full time. The company framed the move as a restructuring of its corporate organization rather than a broad store-level downsizing, with the affected roles tied to the Atlanta Store Support Center and related corporate functions. In a statement summarized in The Brief, Home Depot said roughly 800 roles associated with the Atlanta Store Support Center (SSC) are being eliminated, a small fraction of the more than 16,000 positions across the company’s corporate structure.
Executives are also ending remote arrangements that became common during the pandemic, telling corporate workers they must return to the office five days a week. Reporting on the decision notes that the new in-person requirement will apply to staff tied to the company’s main support hubs, including those in The Vinings area of Metro Atlanta, where the home improvement retailer is based. One account of the shift describes how Home Depot is pairing the job cuts with a mandate that corporate employees be on-site every workday, ending the flexibility many had come to expect.
Inside the 800 job cuts
The 800 eliminated roles represent about 0.2% of Home Depot’s total workforce, a reminder of just how large the retailer has become. According to a Quick Summary of the restructuring, the company employs hundreds of thousands of people overall, with the corporate cuts focused on headquarters and remote positions rather than store associates. Fewer than 150 of the affected roles are based at the Atlanta headquarters itself, with the rest tied to remote or distributed corporate jobs that had been performed away from the main campus, according to reporting that cites internal figures from Atlanta…