Southwest Airlines announced a 1.1% profit sharing bonus for thousands of staff on Wednesday as it revealed its financial results for 2025 – the first full year of activist investment firm Elliott pulling the strings, which saw the airline embark on a radical transformation plan.
Unfortunately, all of those changes – some popular (free Wi-Fi, assigned seating), others despised (the end of the ‘two bags fly for free’ policy) – are yet to have any meaningful impact on Southwest’s bottom line.
How did Southwest’s profit-sharing bonus compare to its rivals?
- Southwest Airlines = 1.1%
- Delta Air Lines = 8.9%
- United Airlines = 4.5%
- JetBlue = 0%
In that sense, it’s a miracle that employees got a profit-sharing bonus at all, and Southwest’s flight attendants can, at least, console themselves with the fact that their peers at American Airlines have been awarded a paltry 0.3% profit sharing bonus, which will work out to around $150 for many workers.
Southwest reported a profit of $441 million for full year 2025 on the back of record annual revenue of $28.1 billion, but while the airline clearly wants to talk up the benefits of its transformation program, the real reason behind Southwest’s modest profit is a little more nuanced.
For one, the airline’s profits were helped out by lower fuel costs in the year before, while cost-cutting across the business has also been at play.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Elliott’s obvious desire to increase Southwest’s share price and extract maximum value out of the business for shareholders, the airline also sunk $2.9 billion in stock buybacks.
As for whether Southwest should start seeing the fruits of its labor in 2026 from all the change initiatives it implemented last year, the airline says it is still a little too early to tell.
Southwest does, however, expect to get enough data by next month to assess the “upside potential” of all the changes.
One reason that Southwest is still gathering data is that assigned seating, along with new premium seating options, was only introduced on Tuesday, and it expects passengers to ‘buy up’ to better legroom seats closer to the time of travel.
Southwest is also hoping that its range of new fares will attract new customers, but, again, it’s still waiting for more data.
Given what Southwest has been through in the last few years, it’s probably fair to say that employees aren’t too mad with this years profit sharing bonus, although there’s certainly a view that they now expect all of these changes to start improving the airline’s financial position.
