Arup spends £20m on redundancy costs as staff numbers cut by more than 800

Arup said it spent nearly £20m on redundancy costs last year as the firm cut worldwide staff numbers by 5%, the firm’s latest report and accounts reveal.

In accounts for Arup Group, now filed at Companies House, the firm said it shelled out £19.8m which it said were for “headcount reduction costs”.

It added: “During the year ended 31 March 2025, the group undertook a reshaping programme to reflect anticipated forward workload, business size shape and skillsets.”

The latest figures comes on top of the near £24m it spent in 2024 on cost-cutting, bringing the total amount it has put aside for redundancies in the past two years to more than £43m.

According to the accounts, the number of staff at the year-end was 16,930 – down from 17,740 last time.

It added that a fraud incident, which cost it £25m in its 2024 accounts, had now been resolved and booked no exceptional item for it in its 2025 accounts.

Turnover at the firm stayed broadly flat last year at £2.2bn but pre-tax profit nudged up 2% to £45m.

In a note accompanying the accounts, Jerome Frost, the firm’s first ever chief executive, said: “We achieved a solid financial performance and maintained profitability Our business like many continued to experience economic challenges with some of the markets we work in seeing a slowdown in investment some of those due to change in a year of elections.

“Some challenges persist particularly around reduced infrastructure spending and a quieter global property market The changes in capital flows have also led to growth in some new markets and we are in a strong position to target these.”

The accounts show that its biggest business remains the UK with revenue of £652m, although this was down 5% on last time.

Workloads in Asia, its second biggest market, were up 17% to £455m but in the Americas they fell 9% to £442m.