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We have to go back to the 30 layoff rounds reported in the first quarter of 2022 to find a similarly low level during the first three months of the year.\n Have we passed the peak of biotech layoffs? It’s too early to say for certain—but an intriguing story is playing out in the figures.According to an analysis of Fierce Biotech’s layoff data, a total of 33 biopharma companies were reported to be either laying off employees or shutting down in the first three months of this year. While still high, this number is indicative of a gradual trend of slowing job cuts that Fierce first identified back in September. That downward trajectory resulted in a similar 33 layoff rounds in the final quarter of 2025, barely half of the 64 and 62 layoff announcements seen in the second and third quarters of last year, respectively.Last year was certainly tough, as demonstrated by a separate Fierce Pharma analysis that showed that the 17 pharma companies with at least $20 billion in annual revenue collectively reduced their workforces by more than 22,000 employees over the course of 2025.But to really put the latest layoff figures in context, we should compare them to previous first quarters. The 33 announcements in the first three months of 2026 are barely half of the 63 reports we saw in the same quarter of 2025, and significantly below the 57 and 58 rounds we listed in the first quarters of 2023 and 2024, respectively.In fact, we have to go back to the 30 layoff rounds reported in the first quarter of 2022 to find a similar level.The relative drop-off in layoff rounds that began in the final months of last year reflects the fact that many biopharmas have now conducted an overdue appraisal of their strategies, suggested Max Baumann, co-founder and Head of Execution at Treehill Partners, a healthcare-focused advisory firm.“During 2025, biotech and pharma started realizing things that they should have realized two or three years ago, which is: we need a course-correct,” Baumann told Fierce in an interview.“In early 2025, we saw panic, tariff fear, some clinical failures triggering individual layoffs at biotechs,” he added. “But within the larger pharma industry, we basically had a larger degree of uncertainty.” While some of this uncertainty may linger, there “just isn\'t as much meat left to cut” at larger companies, suggested Baumann, who pointed to Novo Nordisk’s decision in September to lay off 9,000 employees as well as Bayer’s long-running restructuring under CEO Bill Anderson.That’s not to paint too rosy a picture of the current state of the industry. In the final days of the first quarter, Takeda unveiled plans to cut 634 jobs in the U.S. as part of a massive restructuring designed to save the company more than 200 billion Japanese yen ($1.26 billion) annually. It followed the Japanese pharma’s announcement in January that it would remove 243 field-based commercial employees to prepare for the loss of exclusivity on its depression drug Trintellix.Other significant redundancy rounds included Germany’s Evotec—which will lay off 800 employees and shutter four sites over the next two years—and Viatris, which is shaving off around 10% of its 32,000-strong global workforce as part of plans to save up to $700 million annually. Among biotechs, some of the most severe layoffs were at Theravance Biopharma, which halved its headcount and abandoned its R&D ambitions in early March in the wake of a phase 3 fail for its blood pressure med.March also saw Gossamer Bio shrink its workforce by 48% after the company’s phase 3 study of seralutinib in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension missed its primary endpoint. Meanwhile, Tessera Therapeutics unveiled plans at the start of the year to lay off 90 employees across a number of U.S. states despite the Flagship-founded company insisting it was “on the cusp of a critical inflection point” as it prepared its Regeneron-partnered in-vivo genome-editing product for the clinic.The quarter continued to see companies shutter, including IO Biotech, which followed its latest round of layoffs in January by filing for bankruptcy in March after its attempts to secure approval for its cancer vaccine ran out of road. Molecular glue company f5 Therapeutics also shut down in March, with the company’s CEO citing how “brutal” the past few years have been for early-stage biotechs. Another notable closure was Nido Biosciences, which decided to wind down after its small-molecule for a rare neurological disease disappointed in a phase 2 trial.While biopharma layoffs will remain a part of the life cycle of the industry, can we expect the relatively lower number of announcements to continue through the year?“I don\'t expect the same intensity to re-occur in 2026 from a general operations perspective,” Treehill Partners\' Baumann told Fierce.But there are the “wild cards” of the impact of AI and tariffs that could have unexpected impacts on the industry, he suggested.“Will that result in layoffs? I\'m not sure.”