Nicolas Franchet had spent 13 years at Meta and worked his way up to senior director, the kind of tenure that usually comes with a bigger salary and richer benefits, when the February 2025 layoffs pushed him out at 54. His lawsuit says workers 40 and older were 1.5 times as likely to lose their jobs as workers under 40, and workers 50 and older were 2.5 times as likely.
He’s not the only one making that argument. Other major employers have faced the same accusation for years: as workers near retirement, they get more expensive to keep, and that makes them easier to cut. Age discrimination lawsuits tied to layoffs have hit tech companies including IBM.
Nearly a quarter of workers 50 and older say they are being pushed out of their jobs specifically because of their age, and about two out of three say they’ve seen or experienced age bias at work firsthand.
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Your paycheck and your health plan got expensive
Pay tends to climb with tenure, and health insurance costs climb with age even faster. A full price health plan bought on the individual market averages 752 dollars a month at 40 and 1,598 dollars a month at 60, more than double for essentially the same coverage.
Employers feel a version of that same math. Companies where at least 35 percent of the workforce is 50 or older pay noticeably more for group health coverage than companies with a younger mix, on both single and family plans.
Premiums aren’t leveling off either. Employers are projected to spend more than 18,000 dollars per worker on health coverage in 2026, and an aging workforce is part of why.
None of that makes it legal to act on. A manager comparing two employees doing similar work, one of whom costs more in salary and benefits because of decades on the job, is looking at a number that tracks almost perfectly with age. Courts have treated cost tied to age as a stand-in for age itself for a long time, which is exactly why companies rarely say that’s the real reason out loud.
They assume you don’t have much runway left
If you look like someone who might retire in a few years, some managers quietly stop investing in you. Why train someone for a leadership track, hand them a multi year project, or spend money developing them if the assumption is that they’re already halfway out the door.
One in five older workers report being passed over for training opportunities that went to younger colleagues instead.
The assumption rarely gets tested against reality. Nobody actually knows how long any individual employee, at any age, plans to stay. Older workers typically stay in their jobs longer than early career workers do, which usually saves an employer money on recruiting and training rather than costing it. A growing share of workers in their 50s and 60s are also holding onto their current jobs longer than planned, since many say they haven’t saved enough to retire on schedule, which cuts against the flight risk story some managers tell themselves.
The short runway story also assumes retirement means checking out well before it happens, which isn’t how most people who are still showing up to work every day actually behave.
They assume you can’t keep up with the technology
Every rollout of new software, a new system, a new AI tool, seems to come with a quiet assumption about who’s going to struggle with it.
About a third of older workers say colleagues have assumed they’re less comfortable with technology, and about a quarter say they’ve been assumed to be resistant to change.
The data tells a different story. Workers 50 and older have added skills like AI to their professional profiles at a rate of 25 percent over the past five years, nearly double the growth rate among younger workers over the same period.
Other common assumptions round out the picture: roughly a fifth of workers 50 and older say coworkers joke about generational differences or overlook their accomplishments and expertise.
That disconnect between assumption and reality matters, because deciding someone can’t learn a new system based on their birth year is close to a textbook example of what the Age Discrimination in Employment Act was written to stop, even when nobody says the word age out loud.
They can replace you with someone cheaper
Sometimes the plan is simpler than a spreadsheet. Cut the person earning a senior salary, hire someone with less experience for less money, and the line item shrinks.
Franchet’s lawsuit lays out exactly that pattern for one company’s 2025 layoffs: workers 40 and older were 1.5 times as likely to be cut as workers under 40, and workers 50 and older were 2.5 times as likely.
It has cost other companies real money before. Hewlett Packard and its spinoff paid 18 million dollars in 2023 to settle claims that they pushed out older employees, and Google paid 11 million dollars in 2019 over hiring discrimination allegations tied to age.
A cheaper replacement isn’t automatically illegal. What crosses the line is when age, not skill or salary on its own, is the reason an older worker gets selected for the cut while someone doing similar work does not. That distinction, age as the deciding factor rather than a coincidence, is the difference between an unfortunate business decision and an unlawful one.
They use a reorg or a layoff as cover
Individual firings for cause draw more scrutiny than they used to, so a lot of this now happens inside something bigger: a reorganization, a reduction in force, a round of cuts framed around performance.
Franchet says he was rated a low performer in the same round of layoffs, despite years of strong reviews and a stock award that came with a personal note from the company’s CEO the year before.
It isn’t a new playbook. Internal emails at another major tech company once surfaced showing executives discussing wanting to hire more young workers and let older ones go.
Bundling age based decisions into a broader restructuring makes them harder to challenge, because the company can point to the reorg itself as the reason rather than any one employee’s age. It doesn’t make the underlying decision legal. It just makes it more work to prove.
The law firm representing Franchet says it’s looking into other claims from the same round of cuts, including potential violations of the WARN Act, the federal law requiring advance notice before mass layoffs.
Signs it crossed into age discrimination
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects workers 40 and older at companies with 20 or more employees, covering hiring, firing, pay, promotions and layoffs.
A layoff alone isn’t proof of anything. A pattern is worth paying attention to: strong performance reviews for years followed by a sudden negative one right before a termination, a much younger and less experienced person doing your job within months, comments about energy, fresh perspective or culture fit aimed specifically at older employees, or training and stretch projects that consistently go to younger colleagues instead of you.
Numbers matter more than any single story. If a round of layoffs skews heavily toward employees over 40 or 50 while retaining younger employees in similar roles, that’s the kind of statistical pattern that shows up in age discrimination lawsuits like the one against Meta.
Both an employer’s stated intent and the actual outcome count under the law. A neutral sounding policy, like cutting anyone above a certain salary, can still violate the ADEA if it lands overwhelmingly on older workers.
Where to take it if you think it happened
If you’re offered a severance agreement, you don’t have to sign it on the spot. Federal law gives workers 40 and older at least 21 days to consider an individual severance offer, or 45 days if it’s part of a group layoff, plus 7 more days to change your mind after signing.
In a group layoff, the company also has to disclose the ages and job titles of everyone who was and wasn’t selected, so you can actually see whether the cuts skewed older.
To bring a formal complaint, you generally have 180 days from the termination to file a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, extended to 300 days if your state has its own age discrimination law and an agency enforcing it, which most states do.
An employment attorney can tell you quickly whether what happened looks like a pattern worth pursuing, and many take age discrimination cases on contingency, meaning you don’t pay unless they win. Keep copies of your performance reviews, any layoff communications, and anything showing who replaced you, before you lose access to your work accounts.
