Online tech giant Amazon's second corporate headquarters, in Northern Virginia, where development has been paused for more than three years, failed to fill any high-paying jobs last year that would qualify the company to receive job-creation incentives from the commonwealth.
The company didn't recruit anyone into positions that trigger the payments at the corporate campus, known as HQ2, in the National Landing district that sits in Arlington County and Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. That's according to a report Amazon submitted recently to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
The payment agreement was reached in 2018 when Amazon selected the site from more than 230 bidders in a nationwide competition seeking to lure the Seattle-based company to locate its second headquarters facility in their jurisdiction. Northern Virginia became the sole site for HQ2 after Amazon canceled plans for a similar campus in Long Island City in New York's Queens borough, with incentives related to the winning bid.
Under the first stage of an agreement between Virginia and Amazon that remains in effect, the company can receive up to $550 million for creating 25,000 jobs at HQ2 with an average wage of at least $150,000. Amazon can receive that incentive — at a rate of $22,000 per employee — only if it creates those high-paying jobs.
Amazon's next phase of its HQ2 corporate offices remains on hold as the company undergoes a broad workforce restructuring.
"We experienced, like a lot of tech organizations in the area and nationally, hiring headwinds," an Amazon spokesperson told CoStar News. The representative declined to elaborate on the specific challenges.
Development pause
So far at HQ2, Amazon has built a pair of 22-story office buildings overlooking a roughly 2.5-acre public park. Those properties, collectively known as Metropolitan Park, were completed in mid-2023 and host about 50,000 square feet of retail space.
With the development pause in effect at the site, Arlington Community High School is scheduled to open later this year at Met Park. Originally it was to have been housed in one of the three buildings planned for the second phase of HQ2.
Amazon has created nearly 8,500 positions at HQ2 from its November 2018 selection of National Landing for the HQ2 project to the end of 2025, indicating a slight bump in the total number of employees there at year-end 2024.
But none of those who were brought on last year earned the company a grant from the commonwealth. In fact, while at the end of 2024 there were 7,232 qualifying employees, at the end of 2025 there were only 7,159.
While Amazon previously said its confidence level was high for achieving its HQ2 hiring goal of 25,000 individuals by the end of 2038, it stated for the first time last year, and again last month, that its assessment had been lowered to moderate.
Beyond HQ2, the company is in a different spot than it was a year ago in terms of personnel. It said this January it would cut about 16,000 jobs just three months after saying it would eliminate about 14,000 others.
At HQ2 there was not a large-enough decrease amid those organizational changes to trigger a notice of a mass layoff required by federal law, the Amazon spokesperson said, adding that more than 500 jobs are open there. That was not the case elsewhere in the commonwealth, where nearly 700 company employees received word on Jan. 28 of layoffs across five Amazon Fresh grocery stores in Virginia.
Onsite hiring
The company said in its latest annual report to the commonwealth that the cumulative number of all positions it created between November 2018 and December 2025 is 8,472.
The difference between that number and the incentive-eligible positions Amazon created can be attributed to a combination of factors, including new hires assigned to HQ2 who are awaiting relocation; employees working at HQ2 who live outside of metropolitan Washington, D.C.; and employees reassigned from other Virginia locations.
Amazon could earn another $200 million for a later stage of the agreement, at a lower rate per employee, if it creates an additional 12,850 new eligible jobs.
While it did not do so in this go-around, Amazon has in the past requested money from Virginia for generating new jobs for the region. It sought a payment of $6,446,000 for creating and filling 293 incentive-eligible jobs in the 2024 calendar year.
Those funds are scheduled to be released in September 2029. A few years ago, the company made its first request under the agreement for nearly $153 million, which is slotted to be released this September.
Meanwhile, Arlington County said last fall it was set to send $81,745 to the tech giant in a separate agreement. That payment is a result of an arrangement for grant disbursements based on an increase in the county's transient occupancy tax revenue from growth in lodging tax dollars.
"Our second headquarters has always been a long-term investment," Holly Sullivan, Amazon's vice president of worldwide economic development policy, told CoStar News via email. "We've invested more than $2.5 billion in capital, created nearly 8,500 jobs at HQ2 and 43,000+ across Virginia, invested $1.3 billion in affordable housing, and donated $239 million to local nonprofits and schools."