Amazon will stop operations at its PBI3 fulfillment center at 7600 LTC Parkway in Port St. Lucie, Florida, on September 17, affecting about 494 employees. The cuts were disclosed through a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing, the notice large employers must give before a mass layoff.
Most of those losing work are front-line warehouse staff. The notice lists 466 employees in the FC Associate I role, the entry-level fulfillment-center position that handles picking, packing and sorting. Separations fall on two dates, September 17 and December 17.
Temporary building, permanent jobs lost
The distinction that matters for the workers involved is between the building and the employment. Amazon says the site will be closed for roughly two years as part of a $200 million renovation and modernization project and is expected to reopen in 2028.
The layoffs are not similarly provisional. Amazon told regulators the job losses are expected to be permanent, and a worker laid off in September holds no claim on a job at the rebuilt facility two years later. The escape route is internal: employees who take another position at Amazon before their separation date are not laid off at all.
On severance, Amazon has said only that affected workers would receive information regarding benefits and, where applicable, severance. It has not published the terms.
The second Florida site this year
Port St. Lucie is not an isolated case. In April, Amazon said it would lay off 616 workers at its Homestead fulfillment center in Miami-Dade County, with separations running from July 2 to September 30. That site follows the same pattern: a two-year closure under the same $200 million South Florida investment, with a reopening expected in mid-to-late 2028 employing more than 1,000 people.
Together the two sites account for roughly 1,110 jobs coming off Amazon's Florida payroll this year.
Transfers appear to be absorbing a meaningful share of the Homestead total. More than 300 employees there had accepted moves to other regional warehouses, and Amazon is offering a relocation bonus to staff who transfer to a site more than 50 miles away. That option is worth more in a dense warehouse cluster like South Florida than it would be in a region with a single Amazon site, and it means the headline WARN figures likely overstate the eventual number of people out of work.
What to watch
The reopening promise is the part that cannot yet be checked. A rebuilt Homestead facility is projected to employ more than 1,000 people, which would exceed what it employs now, and Amazon has framed both projects as capacity expansions rather than retreats from the state.
Whether that materializes is a 2028 question. In the meantime, the verifiable facts are a two-year gap in operations at both sites, roughly 1,110 WARN-notified job losses, and no published severance terms, with transfers, not the eventual reopening, as the realistic path for workers who want to stay with the company.
