T-Mobile Cuts 77 Washington Jobs, Shuts 7 Stores From Yakima To Bellevue

T-Mobile is closing seven retail stores across Washington and laying off 77 employees statewide, according to a layoff notice filed with the state's Employment Security Department. The cuts, expected to be permanent, hit workers in Bellevue, Seattle, Bellingham, Tacoma, Bothell, Vancouver, Kennewick and Yakima, and include 63 newly affected employees along with 14 workers from an earlier notice whose separation dates were deferred, with departures staggered between September 21 and November 18.

T-Mobile said changing business needs prompted the layoffs, according to KOMO News, which reported that affected roles span technical project and product managers, product and engineering directors, systems architects, retail store managers and mobile associates. The cuts also touch remote employees. Workers losing their jobs have no bumping rights, and the affected locations are non-union, per the same report.

Which Stores Are Closing

The station's report lists the shuttered locations: the Nob Hill Boulevard store in Yakima, the Canyon Pointe store in Bothell, the Tacoma Mobile store, the Chkalov Drive and Southeast Fifth Street store in Vancouver, the 45th Street and Stone Way store in Seattle, the N. Columbia Center Boulevard and W. Quinault Avenue store in Kennewick, and the Bakerview Road and Interstate 5 store in Bellingham. T-Mobile may have offered relocation opportunities to employees affected by the closures, the outlet noted.

Despite the store closures and job cuts, T-Mobile's Bellevue headquarters buildings are expected to remain open, as is the company's Bellingham call center. That's notable given the scale of the company's physical footprint in the region: T-Mobile's global corporate headquarters occupies the Newport Corporate Center in Bellevue's Factoria neighborhood under a multi-building lease running through October 2030, where the carrier previously invested $160 million in campus modernization, according to the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. T-Mobile has anchored that campus since 2000, when it operated as VoiceStream Wireless.

Part Of A Much Bigger Nationwide Push

The Washington cuts are a small piece of a far larger restructuring. T-Mobile US reduced its total workforce by 4,671 full-time employees — a 6.7% drop — between December 2025 and June 2026, bringing its U.S. headcount down to 65,365, according to Light Reading. Parent company Deutsche Telekom's August 2026 earnings report attributed the drop directly to costs tied to the carrier's ongoing Workforce Transformation initiative.

This is not the first Washington filing this year. T-Mobile filed an earlier WARN notice with the state's Employment Security Department on February 2 covering 637 positions across its Bellevue headquarters, Bellingham call center, Bothell switch facilities and data centers, spanning more than 200 job titles including vice presidents, senior managers and network technicians, per WA Labor Intelligence. The late-August filing extends that same multi-phase campaign rather than marking a new, isolated event.

The UScellular Deal Behind The Cuts

Much of the restructuring traces back to T-Mobile's $4.3 billion acquisition of UScellular's wireless operations and customer base, completed in August 2025, a deal that brought duplicative staff positions and triggered nationwide severance expenses, as reported by Fierce Network. Federal regulators approved the deal in July 2025, letting T-Mobile absorb 4.4 million retail customers and regional infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division formally declined to challenge the transaction that same month, concluding UScellular's standalone business model was unsustainable given rising 5G capital expenditure requirements, according to Broadband Breakfast, even as officials flagged market concentration concerns.

It's a pattern T-Mobile has leaned on before. In August 2023, the carrier eliminated 5,000 employees nationwide — about 7% of its workforce — including 401 employees based at its Bellevue headquarters, according to GeekWire. CEO Mike Sievert said at the time that rising customer acquisition costs and duplicative roles left over from the Sprint merger required organizational streamlining.

A Regional Employer Still Rooted In Bellevue

T-Mobile remains one of Bellevue's largest private employers, anchoring the Eastside business hub alongside Amazon and Microsoft with roughly 6,800 employees across the Puget Sound region, per the Kirklandian. The company's continued lease through 2030 underscores that even as it sheds back-office and retail jobs, it isn't going anywhere physically.

The Washington cuts also fit a broader regional trend. Washington's Employment Security Department reported that information technology and corporate technology employers filed WARN notices affecting at least 6,700 workers in 2025, with losses concentrated heavily in King County and driven largely by major employers including Microsoft and Amazon. T-Mobile's repeated rounds of filings — 637 positions in February 2026, 401 in 2023, and now 77 more — reflect a steady erosion of back-office and middle-management roles as the carrier pushes customers toward digital apps and automated service options.

Hoodline previously reported on T-Mobile's Denver job cuts kept under wraps earlier this year, part of the same nationwide restructuring referenced in the February Washington WARN filings.