Qantas Airways

Financial Context

Illustrative wage differential: if the 120+ reported offshore roles were instead employed in Australia at average local rates, the additional cost could be in the order of ~$10M/yr (~0.5% of reported net profit). This is an estimate based on industry averages, not company-specific data.

Would this company be profitable without offshoring?

Every dollar paid offshore leaves the Australian economy, reducing local wages, tax receipts, and economic circulation. Why it matters

Financial data: FY2026. Estimate uses avg AU employment cost of $110,000+/yr (incl. super and on-costs) vs offshore $25,000/yr (salary + on-costs). Actual figures vary by role, seniority, and location.

In Plain English

• In 2026, Qantas Airways was reported to have 120+ offshore contractors and staff.
• This represents ~0.4% when compared to its current workforce of 30,000 (illustrative comparison only, not directly reported by the company).
• 🇸🇬 120+ staff reported in Singapore in Other.
• Known outsourcing partners include Accenture, TTEC, Deloitte.
• 5,850 Australian jobs have been cut.

Based on data from public sources at the dates reported. Figures may not reflect current headcount. See sources below for full attribution.

The Story

• Correction, November 2026This page previously showed 400 offshore workers in Singapore. Qantas announced 120 flight attendants in the first year of its Singapore cabin crew base, growing to as many as 650 within five years, so 400 was a figure no one published. The record is now 120. The number shown on this page is not a Qantas total: the airline publishes no group offshore headcount in either its annual report or its modern slavery statement, and its Philippines contact centres, its cabin crew bases in Thailand and Indonesia, and the back-office work going to Accenture in India are all confirmed but unnumbered. [Paddle Your Own Kanoo]
• 10 November 2026Qantas told staff that 850 corporate roles would go, with the work outsourced to Accenture and delivered “mostly by its teams in India and some in Australia”. The first wave covers finance, procurement, people and marketing, in place by mid-2027, with the rest over coming years. Vanessa Hudson called it “hard news for some”, said Qantas runs “on technology built up over decades for a different era, including more than 1,000 legacy applications that were never designed to work together”, and that the deal “will allow us to unlock innovation faster and accelerate our use of AI, with lasting benefits”. Qantas has not said how many of the 850 are redundancies and how many transfer to Accenture. The airline reported a statutory profit after tax of $1.29 billion for 2025/26, and its shares rose more than 6 per cent on the day of the announcement. [ABC News]
• 10 November 2026Qantas said AI and automation play a “central role” in the partnership and that back-office functions would eventually be “further transformed through automation and AI”. The ASU disputes the framing. Assistant national secretary Scott Cowen said “Earlier this year, Qantas told us directly there was no plan to offshore any jobs”, that “the cost of technology change should not be borne by the workers who have kept the airline running for years” and that “sending more jobs overseas is not in the spirit of Australia”. Qantas denies ever giving the union an assurance that no jobs would move offshore. The union has also made the point that the arrangement introduces no new AI systems or AI agents on day one, which is the basis of its argument that AI is the cover story rather than the cause. [Information Age (ACS)]
• 10 November 2026Qantas says it remains a net employer, with a growing 28,000-strong Australian workforce and more than 4,400 new operational roles added since 2023, and that it invests more than $1 billion in technology each year. That includes the Qantas Product Innovation Centre in Adelaide, which builds customer-facing apps, employs 70 people with 65 per cent recruited in South Australia, and is planned to scale to 400. The Adelaide centre is the counterweight to the 850: front-end product work hired onshore while back-office processing goes to Accenture in India. [Information Age (ACS)]
• 11 November 2026The ASU argued the AI framing is cover for ordinary offshoring. Assistant national secretary Scott Cowen: “We need to make sure that these AI announcements and job cuts are genuine and not a Trojan horse for widespread offshoring.” He said “this isn’t the first announcement we’ve seen by big corporate giants in Australia where they announce a deal with a big tech giant like Accenture”, naming Coles and Telstra, and asked: “Is this using AI as the excuse to say the work can’t be done internally because it’s new or too specialised? And then [using] that as a way to outsource jobs from local communities?” Offshore Watch records confirmed Accenture managed-services engagements at both Coles and Telstra, and at ANZ, CBA, NAB, Westpac, Suncorp, Origin Energy, Wesfarmers, Woolworths, PEXA and more than a dozen federal government bodies. Vanessa Hudson’s defence was capacity rather than cost: “Reinvention at this scale is not possible to do on our own ... because we cannot hire at the pace this work needs.” Qantas also described the mechanism, which is worth reading closely: in-house processes are sent to India, where they are analysed and simplified, automation is added, and the process is then re-incorporated into Qantas’s Australian operations at a later date. On that account the offshoring is the step that precedes the automation, not a consequence of it. [The Age]
• 11 November 2026Transport Minister Catherine King said outsourcing is now part of the Qantas business model: “This has been a model that Qantas has been using for some time, outsourcing jobs, no longer having them in house.” She invoked the airline’s record: “I think that we saw the last time that it engaged in this sort of level of outsourcing during COVID, that it did a significant amount of damage to its social licence”, and “I think the union is right to be disappointed that it’s resulting in 850 job losses.” On sending AI work abroad: “I think investing in the workforce that has basically built it should be a priority for Qantas”, and “we need those AI capabilities here in Australia as well.” Qantas received $2.7 billion in taxpayer subsidies during COVID, and around the same time outsourced 1,800 ground crew in a move later ruled illegal. Ryan Perrett, one of those 1,800, said the airline “obviously has learnt nothing” from the court case. [The Age]
• September 2026The AFR separately reported that Qantas "is also mulling outsourcing parts of its operations to Accenture", independent corroboration of the Project iQ reporting that had rested on a single account. It appeared in coverage of a warning by the former director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate that offshoring raises cyber risk, published after the Origin Energy breach was traced to a former Accenture employee in Manila who worked on outsourced billing and customer support. Qantas confirmed the deal six weeks later. [Australian Financial Review]
• August 2026The Australian Financial Review reported that Qantas was exploring outsourcing up to 1,000 roles to India under an internal programme called "Project iQ", covering marketing, finance, HR and other back-office functions, with Accenture as the prospective partner. Frontline operational roles (pilots, cabin crew and engineers) were not reported to be in scope. Qantas denied a deal had been struck: "We have been exploring partnerships that have the capability to support us and are in early discussions with Accenture, but no formal agreement is in place and no decisions have been made." The airline framed the work as modernisation: "Like all organisations, Qantas has been looking at ways to accelerate the use of technology and AI to help us modernise the way we work." ASU National Secretary Scott Cowen: "If that commitment from Qantas turns out to be worthless, it won't just be a broken promise to the ASU. It will be a deep breach of trust with the Australian public who have stuck by this airline through everything it has put them through." Qantas confirmed the deal on 10 November 2026, at 850 roles rather than 1,000, and the job losses and the Accenture engagement are now recorded against Qantas. [Information Age (ACS)]
• 2025Calls to Qantas and Qantas Frequent Flyer are answered in Australia or New Zealand. Emails and some back-office functions remain performed offshore through outsourcing partners. [Matchboard]
• FY2025 (30 June 2025)Qantas's modern slavery statement sets out an offshore footprint it never totals. On contact centres: “Our customer contact centre services are provided through a third-party service provider headquartered in Australia. Although this service provider is an Australian entity with a small onshore call centre in Australia (Gosford, NSW), the majority of its contact centres are in the Philippines (Manila and Duma).” The 2024 statement names that provider as TTEC. On cabin crew: the group delivered human rights training to “offshore cabin crew base managers located in Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia”, confirming three offshore crew bases. No headcount is given for any of it. [Qantas Modern Slavery Statement 2025 (pp 8, 16)]
• 2023A data breach at Qantas was linked to a Manila-based call centre operation. [Unfair Dismissals Australia]
• 2023New CEO Vanessa Hudson said Qantas was reviewing its contact centres and "considering whether to bring more of this important task back onshore." [Australian Frequent Flyer]
• 2021Qantas was ordered by the Federal Court to compensate 1,700 workers who were sacked and replaced with outsourced labour. The High Court later upheld the ruling. [Outsource Accelerator]
• 2020Qantas cut 8,500 jobs across the airline during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ASU]
• 2015Qantas closed its Melbourne call centre, followed by its Brisbane call centre the following year. Around 450 full-time Australian jobs were lost. [CX Central]

All facts sourced from public reporting. No editorial commentary. Click source links to verify.