Canva Cuts 1,271 Jobs but Offers Six Months' Pay and $10,000 Grants

Canva is cutting or reshaping 1,271 jobs — 22 percent of its workforce — while handing every departing employee at least six months' salary, a year of healthcare and a shot at a $10,000 startup grant. The Australian-founded design software company announced the restructuring on Tuesday, November 3. It's Canva's largest reorganization since launching in 2013.

The headline number needs one caveat. The 1,271 figure includes employees asked to relocate, so the final tally of departures won't be known until those workers decide. Some will lose their jobs outright. Others will see their roles change or be asked to move.

Why is Canva restructuring?

Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins called it Canva's "hardest year yet." Growth slowed for the first time in a decade, and guidance was revised earlier this year. But this isn't a distressed company. Canva remains profitable, expects 20 percent year-on-year revenue growth, and says 2026 will mark its 10th consecutive profitable year.

Perkins said the restructuring aims to simplify a business that has grown fragmented, reduce management layers and give teams greater ownership. Sydney will become the primary home for more product teams, which is why some staff are being asked to relocate. Canva hasn't published a breakdown of layoffs by job title, department or country.

For individuals, that opacity matters: if you work at Canva, or vendor adjacent to it, the market signal is about organizational flattening rather than a specific function being cut. Takeaway: this is a simplification play, not a rescue operation.

What's in the exit package?

The terms are unusually rich by tech-layoff standards:

• At least six months' salary, including statutory entitlements, regardless of location.
• Employees with under a year of tenure keep their shares and equity despite being laid off before their first anniversary.
• 12 months of continued healthcare coverage.
• A year of access to Canva Care, the company's Employee Assistance Program (EAP — workplace counseling and support service), extended to family members.
• One-on-one career coaching, interview preparation and a year of LinkedIn Premium.
• Part of Canva's Talent Acquisition team will help affected workers review resumes and practice interviews.
• An opt-in alumni directory shared with investors, partners and industry contacts.
• Departing employees keep their Canva-issued MacBooks.

The most unusual element is the Canva Collective Fund. Departing employees can apply for $10,000 grants to start a business or pursue a community-benefiting project. Canva takes no ownership or equity in anything created through the initiative.

Reaction has been largely positive. Jasveer Singh, co-founder and CEO of KnotDating, called it "a master-class in how to handle layoffs" and described Perkins' announcement as "thoughtful, honest and generous." Mark Di Stefano, Rear Window editor at The Australian Financial Review, called the package "exceedingly generous." Skeptics pushed back. One user, socialistMAD, wrote: "There will be fine print if your business starts to gross a certain amount they will come back for something…All of that really gives you no security" — pointing out that six months' salary may not stretch far in the current job market.

Is AI behind the layoffs?

Not directly, according to Canva. The company's stated position is that affected roles are not being replaced by AI. Instead, AI is reshaping what Canva builds and how it organizes teams. Perkins said: "new technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use."

The AI context is hard to ignore. In April, Canva launched Canva AI 2.0, its "most significant product evolution" since 2013, which generates layered, editable designs from prompts and runs agentic workflows (AI agents that complete multi-step tasks such as web research, scheduling and coding). In October, it unveiled Craft, its first in-house image-generation foundation model, built by Canva Research. Last week it announced Canva Brush, an AI model for understanding and editing designs that Canva says is up to 69 percent faster on general editing tasks and 46 percent cheaper per task than its previous design agent.

Usage is climbing too. Since the new Canva AI experience began rolling out in September, usage has roughly doubled, and users who discover Canva through AI assistants convert to paid subscriptions at nearly twice the company's average rate.

Canva's stated reasons remain broader than AI: slowing growth, organizational complexity, fragmented ownership and a return to smaller, autonomous teams. For design and product workers watching from outside, the message is that AI fluency is becoming a structural hiring filter — and Canva's package is the new benchmark departing employees will measure other tech employers against.