Howard Stern’s ‘Flexible’ New Deal Cost His Staff Their Jobs

Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show drops to one new episode a week once Labor Day passes, and about a dozen of his staffers lost their jobs to get there. Staff learned the news on a Zoom call on Monday, July 13, with severance checks going out the same day, according to Page Six.

Stern signed a new three-year contract in December promising him more free time. He got exactly that. The producers and staffers who spent years building his show did not get a vote in the trade, and their exit says more about where SiriusXM is headed than anything Stern has said on the air lately.

A Dozen Jobs Disappear Over One Zoom Call

The cuts hit fast. Reporting on the staff meeting described managers telling employees during the call that The Howard Stern Show would move from multiple weekly episodes to a single new show once Stern returns from his summer break after Labor Day.

Stern kept a core group of veteran producers. Everyone else was sent home immediately after the call. One source close to the show gave Page Six a blunt explanation for the cuts: “He just doesn’t need that much content anymore.” The rest of the weekly schedule will lean on Stern’s decades-deep archive of old segments and interviews.

Stern himself has framed the new pace as something he earned. “More free time and continuing to be on the radio,” he told listeners, adding, “I do like my days off. You know me, I’m never bored. I’m busy every minute.” His wife, Beth Stern, backed him up on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM show, saying his new schedule “is working out really well for him” and that hosting still gave him “an outlet” because he remained “very good at it.”

The Contract That Promised Stern More Freedom

This all traces back to a single Tuesday morning in December 2025. Stern had spent months as the subject of retirement rumors, at one point joking with SiriusXM host Andy Cohen that he had been fired, before finally announcing a deal on his own show.

I’m happy to announce that I figured out a way to have it all, more free time, and continuing to be on the radio. So yes, we are coming back for three more years.

That was Stern, addressing his audience on December 16, 2025, in an announcement confirmed the same day by a SiriusXM spokesperson who did not disclose financial terms. The new deal runs through the end of 2028 and is, according to the media trade site The Desk, Stern’s shortest contract since he joined the satellite broadcaster in 2006, when every prior renewal ran five years. His previous deal, signed in 2020, was reportedly worth between $450 million and $500 million over five years.

Stern also said the new arrangement extended to his longtime co-host. “I was able to create Robin a more flexible schedule,” he told listeners, referring to Robin Quivers, who has been at his side on the air since the 1980s. What flexibility meant for the two of them at the microphone, it turns out, meant something very different for the people behind the glass.

The Staffers Who Never Got a Vote

Those laid off received severance based on tenure and were reportedly bound by nondisclosure agreements that keep them from speaking publicly about the terms of their exit. Some former Stern employees have said in the past that he underpaid staff relative to the fortune his contracts generated for him personally, a grievance that predates this month’s cuts.

Neither Stern nor SiriusXM has confirmed publicly how many staffers were affected or whether more departures are coming, and the company has not responded to press requests for comment on the schedule change itself.

Set against SiriusXM’s other recent talent bets, the contrast is stark. The company has spent years signing checks to younger podcast hosts even as it trims its own payroll and, this month, Stern’s.

Cooper’s deal, which pulled Call Her Daddy away from a Spotify pact worth $60 million, made her one of the best-paid podcasters alive at 29. SiriusXM announced the agreement itself as a move to bring exclusive advertising and distribution rights for Cooper’s Unwell Network into its podcast business. Stern, at 71, is the one being asked to do less for a shorter deal, while a 30-year-old the company is grooming to replace some of his cultural weight gets more.

Four Years, Five Rounds of Cuts at SiriusXM

Stern’s staff is not an isolated case. It is the fifth consecutive year SiriusXM has cut jobs somewhere in the company, a pattern that started well before Stern’s December renewal and has continued underneath it.

1. March 2023: SiriusXM laid off 475 employees, about 8% of its workforce, with CEO Jennifer Witz telling staff nearly every department would be affected.
2. February 2024: A second round cut roughly 160 jobs, about 3% of staff, as Witz pushed the company to become more efficient and agile.
3. January 2025: Around 100 more roles were eliminated, under 2% of the workforce, days ahead of the company’s year-end earnings call.
4. March 2025: A third straight year of cuts hit the product and technology teams hardest, this time without a disclosed headcount.
5. July 2026: About a dozen staffers on Stern’s own show are let go over a single Zoom call.

The pattern lines up with a company under real financial pressure for most of that stretch. SiriusXM’s full-year revenue fell 3% to $8.7 billion in 2024, and the company braced for roughly 200,000 more subscriber losses in 2025 as it pulled back marketing on its streaming app. It also finished splitting off from its longtime parent, Liberty Media, in September 2024, becoming a standalone public company that had to answer for its own cost structure for the first time.

The Books Look Better Than They Have in Years

By the time Stern’s staff got the Zoom call, SiriusXM’s numbers had turned. The company’s first-quarter 2026 results, released April 30, showed revenue of $2.09 billion, up 1% from a year earlier, and net income of $245 million, up 20%. Earnings per diluted share climbed to $0.72.

Free cash flow more than tripled to $171 million from $56 million a year earlier. Self-pay subscriber losses narrowed to 111,000 in the quarter, down from 303,000 in the same period a year before, a 63% improvement in the rate of decline. Monthly churn fell to about 1.5%, which the company’s own filing called the lowest first-quarter level in its history. Total subscribers held at roughly 33 million, about where the base has sat since 2020.

“Our strong first-quarter results reflect the resilience of our business model and our ability to deliver value to subscribers and advertisers alike,” CEO Jennifer Witz said of the results. Chief Financial Officer Sean Sullivan struck a similar note, saying the company remained on track on its cost savings goals while working to strengthen its balance sheet. None of that improvement required Howard Stern to work more. If anything, it arrived as he agreed to work less.

New Money Is Chasing Younger Ears

SiriusXM president Scott Greenstein has said the company would like Stern to stay as long as it makes financial sense on both sides. But the money keeps flowing toward newer names.

• Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy and her full Unwell Network of shows, signed away from Spotify in 2024
• The SmartLess podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett
• Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco podcast operation, folded into SiriusXM’s roster in an earlier deal
• A newer distribution push built around reaching listeners on YouTube and other platforms beyond the car dashboard

Combined, SiriusXM says its businesses now reach a monthly audience of about 255 million listeners across satellite radio, Pandora and its podcast network. That is the scale the company is building toward. Stern’s one-time role as the singular draw that could move subscriber numbers by millions is being replaced by a roster, not a single name.

Is Howard Stern Really Winding Down?

Not officially, and not yet. Stern is contracted through the end of 2028, still holds the title that made SiriusXM a serious business twenty years ago, and has given no public indication he plans to leave before his deal expires. But a King of All Media who once anchored five live shows a week is now built around archive tape for six of every seven days.

Greenstein has said the company has managed Stern’s contract cycles before and expects to again. Whether the next renewal shrinks further, or disappears entirely, depends on numbers neither side has been willing to publish so far.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has SiriusXM confirmed the layoffs on Howard Stern’s show?

Not officially. As of the reports this month, neither Stern nor SiriusXM had publicly addressed the staffing changes, and the exact number of employees affected has not been confirmed by the company itself, only described by sources as about a dozen.

Is Robin Quivers still part of the show?

Yes. When Stern announced his December 2025 contract renewal, he said he had arranged a more flexible schedule for Quivers as part of the deal, confirming she remains involved even as the live broadcast schedule shrinks.

What is SiriusXM Play?

SiriusXM Play is a lower-priced, ad-supported satellite plan the company announced as part of its pivot back toward in-car listeners. As of the most recent reporting, it remained unavailable to most customers, with no confirmed broad launch date.

How much could SiriusXM lose if Stern left the company entirely?

Back in 2020, Credit Suisse analyst Brian Russ estimated that about 15% of Stern’s listeners could cancel their subscriptions if he departed, a potential loss of roughly 2.7 million subscribers, a figure often cited internally as one reason the company keeps renewing him even on shorter terms.