As Apple has grown its product lines (such as MacBooks and iPhones) and expanded the services it offers (such as cloud storage and Apple TV) over the years and decades, it has needed to hire more people.
From its two founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who started Apple from a garage in 1976, the company employs tens of thousands of people worldwide with offices and retail stores in 20 countries.
Here’s how many employees Apple has, how much they make, where they work, and what the CEO pay gap looks like.
Apple had about 166,000 full-time employees worldwide in its fiscal year ending Sept. 27, 2025, according to business data aggregator Bullfinch. That’s more than double the number of people (about 60,400) employed in fiscal 2011, when founder Steve Jobs served his last full year as CEO.
According to Apple’s job creation page, 80,000 employees — a little more than half of the company’s workforce — are in the United States, and an additional 450,000 work for the company’s suppliers.
Here’s a look at the company’s employment footprint over the past decade:
Related: Where is Apple’s headquarters? An office like a spaceship with thousands of trees
Apple will earn $416 billion in 2025. Based on 166,000 full-time employees, the company brings in about $2.5 million per employee. By comparison, in 2011, the year before Tim Cook took over as CEO, earnings per employee were lower, at $1.79 million (based on $108 billion in revenues and about 60,400 full-time employees).
By comparison, earnings per employee at Nvidia — the world’s largest company by market value — were larger, at $5.1 million in fiscal 2026, based on about 42,000 employees and $215.9 billion in revenue.
Apple, like other companies, uses a CEO pay ratio, which compares the CEO’s compensation to the median employee.
In 2025, CEO Tim Cook was the highest paid employee at $3 million. His annual salary has not changed since 2016, but his total compensation was $74.29 million, compared to the median employee compensation of $139,483. The CEO pay ratio was 533 to 1. This ratio is based on Apple’s annual base salary for permanent full-time and part-time employees who have not worked a full year.
By comparison, Nvidia’s ratio was smaller, at 1 in 166, due to employing fewer workers and paying a higher median wage than Apple. CEO Jensen Huang’s total compensation in Nvidia’s 2025 fiscal year was $49.86 million, versus $301,233 for a media employee.
Apple does not make this information public. According to Unify GTM, which collects data using artificial intelligence, most of Apple’s workforce is in engineering.
Based on Apple’s 120,485 employees (which would equate to a headcount of 123,000 full-time employees in 2017), 41% were in engineering, followed by business management (15%), sales and support (9%), marketing and product (7%), operations (7%), finance and technology (36%), information technology (36%), information technology (36%) and the remaining 3% unaffiliated. recognized
By comparison, in 2026, Nvidia had 42,000 employees in 38 countries, with 31,000 involved in research and development and 11,000 in sales, marketing, operations, and administrative positions.
More about Apple:
Apple’s workforce dynamics are likely to change in the coming years. In 2025, the tech giant announced plans to invest $600 billion in the United States over four years, aiming to bring its supply chain and advanced manufacturing back home through an initiative called the American Manufacturing Program (AMP).
Apple said that within four years, it plans to hire 20,000 people directly in the United States — most of which will focus on research and development, silicon engineering, software development, and AI and machine learning.
Apple’s largest concentration of workers is at the Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California, which has more than 12,000 employees in many areas of the company, including research and development. Still, Apple has more than 500 retail stores worldwide, which collectively employ thousands of workers.
This story was originally published by The Street on March 11, 2026, where it first appeared in the Technology section. Add TheStreet as a Favorite Source by clicking here.
