GM Employees Breakdown By Segment and Category

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This page presents General Motors’ employees breakdown by segment and category. GM’s segments consist of GM North America (GMNA), GM International (GMI), and GM Financial.

GM’s employees breakdown by category consist of hourly and salaried employees.

Let’s examine GM’s workforce!

For other key statistics of General Motors, you may find more resources on this page: GM key stats.

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Insight & Summary of GM’s Employees Breakdown By Segment and Category

GM’s workforce has undergone a substantial, multi-year restructuring — shrinking overall while becoming considerably more concentrated in North America and shifting steadily toward a more salaried, less hourly composition, both worldwide and within the U.S. specifically.

• Worldwide Headcount by Segment: A Dramatic Shift Toward North America Concentration Total Worldwide employees fell from 216,000 (2014) to 156,000 (2025) — a 28% reduction — but this decline was overwhelmingly driven by GM International, which collapsed from 99,000 employees (2014) to just 28,000 (2025), a 72% reduction. GM North America, by contrast, actually grew in absolute terms through 2016 (peaking at 124,000) before declining more modestly to 119,000 by 2025. The result is a striking mix-share shift: GM North America’s share of worldwide headcount rose from 50.9% (2014) to 76.3% (2025), while GM International fell from 45.8% to just 17.9% over the same period — GM’s workforce has become dramatically more concentrated in North America, largely because international operations were scaled back far more aggressively than domestic ones.

• Worldwide Headcount by Category: A Steady Shift Toward Salaried Employees Worldwide Salaried Employees’ mix share grew from 37.0% (2014) to a peak of 48.5% (2022), before declining somewhat to 43.6% by 2025. Worldwide Hourly Employees fell in absolute terms from 136,000 (2014) to 88,000 (2025) — a 35% reduction — a steeper decline than salaried headcount, consistent with the broader narrative of workforce restructuring being concentrated among hourly (largely manufacturing-associated) roles.

• U.S. Employees: A Long-Running Convergence Between Salaried and Hourly U.S. Salaried and Hourly employee counts have converged steadily over the period: Salaried made up only 44.0% of U.S. headcount in 2014 versus 56.0% Hourly, but by 2025 the two categories were exactly even at 50.0% each. This convergence wasn’t perfectly linear — Salaried’s mix share peaked at 55.8% in 2022 before declining back to 50.0% by 2025 — but the multi-year direction is unambiguous: GM’s U.S. workforce has become far more balanced between salaried and hourly roles than it was a decade ago.

• GM Financial: A Small But Notably Stable Segment GM Financial has remained the smallest of the three worldwide segments throughout, holding steady in a narrow 3.2%-6.1% mix-share band across the entire eleven-year period — the only segment whose relative size didn’t meaningfully change, even as GM North America and GM International moved dramatically in opposite directions.

• Structural Takeaway: GM’s overall worldwide headcount reduction over the past decade was driven overwhelmingly by GM International’s contraction, while GM North America’s employee base has been comparatively far more stable — a genuine structural rebalancing toward domestic concentration rather than a uniform global downsizing. Given both the worldwide and U.S.-specific data show a consistent multi-year shift toward a more salaried, less hourly-weighted workforce, and given this trend has continued even through the recent overall headcount decline, the more important question going forward is whether GM North America’s own employee base stabilizes near its current ~119,000-123,000 range or continues the gradual decline visible in the most recent three years (123,000 to 119,000).

The table below combines all key GMM’s employee breakdown by segment and category metrics into a single view for the latest three fiscal years.

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Headcount from GMNA, GMI, and GM Financial

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Headcount mix from GMNA, GMI, and GM Financial

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Headcount from salaried and hourly employees

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Headcount mix from salaried and hourly employees

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U.S. headcount from salaried and hourly employees

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U.S. headcount mix from salaried and hourly employees

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References and Credits

1. All financial figures presented in this article were obtained and referenced from GM’s quarterly and annual reports published in General Motors’ Investor Relations.

2. Pexels Images.

Disclosure

We may use the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to produce some of the text in this article. However, the data is directly obtained from original sources (usually the annual and quarterly reports) and meticulously cross-checked by our editors multiple times to ensure its accuracy and reliability.

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