As Apple has expanded its product lines (such as MacBooks and iPhones) and expanded the services it offers (such as cloud storage and Apple TV) in recent years and decades, it has needed to employ more and more people.
Since its two founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple in a garage in 1976, the company has evolved into a global technology giant with offices and retail stores in more than 20 countries, employing tens of thousands of people around the world.
Below is how many employees Apple has, how much they earn, 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 Bullfincher. That’s more than double the number of people it employed (about 60,400) 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 less 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? A spaceship-like office with thousands of trees
Apple reported $416 billion in revenue in 2025. With 166,000 full-time workers, the company generated about $2.5 million per employee. By comparison, in 2011, a year before Tim Cook took over as CEO, revenue per employee was lower at $1.79 million (based on $108 billion in revenue and about 60,400 full-time employees).
By comparison, revenue per employee at Nvidia, the world’s largest company by market value, was higher, at $5.1 million in its fiscal 2026 year, based on about 42,000 employees and $215.9 billion in revenue.
Apple, like other companies, uses a CEO compensation index, which compares the CEO’s compensation to that of the average employee.
In 2025, CEO Tim Cook was the highest-paid employee at $3 million. His annual salary had not changed since 2016. But his total compensation was $74.29 million, compared to the average employee compensation of $139,483. That CEO pay ratio was 533 to 1. This ratio is based on Apple’s annualized base salaries for permanent full- and part-time employees who did not work the entire year.
By comparison, Nvidia’s ratio was lower, 166 to 1, because it employs fewer workers than Apple and pays a higher average wage. CEO Jensen Huang’s total compensation in Nvidia’s fiscal year 2025 was $49.86 million, compared to $301,233 for the average employee.
Apple does not provide this information publicly. According to Unify GTM, which collects data using artificial intelligence, most of Apple’s workforce is in engineering.
Based on 120,485 Apple employees (which would roughly equal its workforce of around 123,000 full-time employees in 2017), 41% were in engineering, followed by business management (15%), sales and support (9%), marketing and products (7%), operations (7%), finance and administration (6%), information technology (4%), consulting (3%), other (5%), and a remaining 3% that Unify did not identify.
By comparison, in 2026, Nvidia had 42,000 employees in 38 countries, of which 31,000 were 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 a four-year period, with the goal of bringing part of its supply chain and advanced manufacturing home through an initiative called the American Manufacturing Program (AMP).
Apple said that within four years it planned to directly hire 20,000 people in the United States, most of whom would focus on research and development, silicon engineering, software development, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The largest concentration of Apple workers is at its Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California, which is home to more than 12,000 employees across many of the company’s divisions, including research and development. Still, Apple has more than 500 retail stores around the world, which together employ thousands of workers.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on March 11, 2026, where it first appeared in the Technology section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.