Amazon’s HQ2 hiring stalled in 2025

Amazon.com did not add any jobs at its HQ2 in Arlington County last year that qualified for Virginia’s workforce grant incentives and will not seek a state payment this year, marking a sharp slowdown in hiring at its $2.5 billion East Coast headquarters project.

In a filing submitted Wednesday to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the company said it would provide a progress report for Virginia’s Major Headquarters Workforce Grant but would not request funding because it didn’t create any new incentive-eligible positions last year.

The decision represents a notable shift from last year, when Amazon requested more than $6.4 million through the same program after adding 293 qualifying jobs in 2024. The grant pays out $22,000 per qualifying job. For jobs to count toward state incentive payments in 2025, Amazon’s HQ2 workforce had to meet an average annual wage target of $164,016, as specified in its agreement with the state.

The hiring slowdown follows earlier signs that Amazon’s HQ2 buildout has fallen short of initial expectations. The company originally projected it would create 10,000 jobs by 2024, but hiring totals fell well short of that mark. The company currently has nearly 8,500 employees who work out of HQ2.

Last year, in a spring application requesting payment of taxpayer-funded incentives from the state, Amazon downgraded its confidence level that it would meet its job target of hiring 25,000 positions for HQ2 by 2038 from “high” to “moderate.” In every previous application filed with the state, Amazon had checked the “high” confidence box.

This year, Amazon still intends to declare “moderate” confidence in meeting its goal

A company spokesperson cited industry-wide headwinds as the reason for the hiring slowdown but declined to elaborate on what the headwinds were. Economist Terry Clower, Northern Virginia chair and professor of public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, said last year that HQ2 was likely impacted by economic challenges stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Amazon initially overhiring workers during the e-commerce boom that kicked off just before the pandemic.

Still, the company’s long-term plans for the headquarters have not changed. A spokesperson noted that more than a decade remains before it meets its 2038 hiring goals.

HQ2’s first phase, Metropolitan Park, includes a 2.5-acre public park and 2.1 million square feet of office space spread across two 22-story office towers. It also features more than 50,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, which is home to 13 local small businesses — the majority of which are women- and minority-owned.

However, in 2023, the company paused construction on the second phase of HQ2, PenPlace, which was slated to add 3.3 million square feet of office and retail space spread across three 22-story buildings. While Amazon does not yet know when it might resume construction of PenPlace, the company notes that Met Park currently has capacity for roughly 12,000 employees, and that, with just about 8,500 workers hired, there is still room to grow in the project’s first phase.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company continues to hire and currently has roughly 500 open roles tied to HQ2, but declined to project how many of those positions would likely be filled this year.

A September 2025 report from Arlington County underscores how performance-based incentives tied to Amazon’s HQ2 have materialized more slowly than initially anticipated. For the first time since the 2019 agreement was approved, Arlington County last year said it would issue a grant payment of $81,745 after local hotel tax revenue finally exceeded the required baseline of $24,972,737.

The threshold, tied to the county’s transient occupancy tax, was only reached in fiscal 2025, reflecting the prolonged recovery of business travel following the pandemic. While Amazon has met its office occupancy targets, a county spokesperson emphasized that lodging growth cannot be attributed to any single employer, even as the company contributes to weekday demand in Arlington’s National Landing neighborhood.

Despite the slower job growth, Amazon has continued to expand its footprint in other ways.

Since opening Met Park in May 2023, the company says it has invested heavily in the surrounding community, including more than $1.3 billion to preserve and create over 10,000 affordable housing units across the National Capital region, which includes Northern Virginia, parts of Maryland and Washington, D.C. In February, Amazon broke ground on the Victory Center in Alexandria, remaking a long-vacant office building into 377 affordable homes.

Amazon has also contributed to the new Arlington Community High School, which is slated to open later this year at Met Park. The 30,000-square-foot education space includes an entrance and meeting space on the ground floor of the Merlin building and instructional and administrative spaces up on the fourth floor.

Since 2010, Amazon has invested more than $190 billion in Virginia. It has about 43,000 employees in the state.

“Our second headquarters has always been a long-term investment,” Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide economic development policy, said in a statement, “and 2026 will be a milestone year as we open Arlington Community High School at Met Park, celebrate our 20th anniversary of operations in Virginia, the fifth anniversary of Amazon’s housing fund and continue expanding our workforce development programs for employees and community members. Virginia is a great state to do business, and we’re proud to be a good employer, neighbor and community partner.”