Citi Employee Laid Off Mid-Vacation Over Phone Call: 'I Have to Figure Out Who I Am, and I'm Not Ready'

A Citigroup employee of 10 years was told she had lost her job in a phone call that reached her on holiday, with her husband and her seven-year-old beside her. She wrote about it from the plane, where the child was laughing at videos one seat away, and said: 'Now I have to figure out who I am and I'm not ready.'

The post appeared on the r/Layoffs forum on Reddit, where people compare notes on severance terms and job hunts after being let go. By Monday it had drawn 819 upvotes and 327 replies. The details were ordinary ones: an aisle seat, a child watching videos in the middle seat, a husband working through expense claims by the window.

Similar accounts have been collected on the employee message board TheLayoff over the past fortnight. Some describe waiting weeks for their severance paperwork. Others describe the work left behind. One put it plainly: 'Every time someone leaves, their work gets dumped on the rest of us.'

Her account of her own employment cannot be independently confirmed, and Citigroup does not discuss individual staff. What can be checked is the pattern around her. The pattern shows a bank reducing its workforce continuously rather than in one announced round.

Citigroup's Own Figures Show the Scale of the Reduction

Citigroup employed 219,000 people at the end of the second quarter of 2026, according to the bank's own earnings materials. That is down from 224,000 three months earlier and 230,000 a year before, a drop of roughly 5% in 12 months.

Lined up across three quarters, the decline looks steady rather than sudden, as the chart below shows.

The reductions belong to a plan Citigroup set out in January 2024 to remove 20,000 roles by the end of 2026. Chief executive Jane Fraser has presented the work as simplifying the company. The bank has gone on hiring in banking, wealth management, and technology while cutting elsewhere.

A large share of the losses sits in the part of the bank built up to fix its risk and control systems, after United States regulators issued consent orders in 2020. Citigroup hired heavily for that programme and is now unwinding a large part of it.

What the Cuts Have Cost, and What Citigroup Says Comes Next

Citigroup booked more than $800M (£593M) in severance in the first half of 2026, chief financial officer Gonzalo Luchetti told analysts on 14 July. About $500M (£371M) of that fell in the first quarter and a further $300M (£222M) in the second.

Luchetti also said the bank may speed up its efficiency work and take more severance in the second half. He declined to put a number on it, as the graphic below sets out.

That leaves the rest of the year open for everyone still on the payroll. Citigroup has guided to an efficiency ratio of around 60% for 2026, a figure the bank said reflects both heavier investment and further severance to come.

Filings in New York point the same way. Notices posted to the New York State Department of Labour in early August cover a further 268 permanent redundancies at the bank's Greenwich Street headquarters in Tribeca. The last end dates fall in late September.

Why a Rolling Programme Lands Differently From One Announcement

A rolling programme lands differently from a single announcement, and the quarterly figures do not capture that difference. Staff never reach a date after which they know they were spared. A worker can clear one wave, be promoted, and take a holiday booked months earlier, and still take the call in an airport lounge.

The post described exactly that, which is why it reached readers who have never worked at a bank. She wrote that she had climbed a mountain and felt wonder at the world, and that she was now in tears on a plane. She ended on what she would have to tell her seven-year-old: that all of it means something, which is the opposite of what she now believes.