Questions have been asked over just how savings will be made at James Cook University in Queensland, which has been hit with a $26 million funding cut.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) says James Cook University (JCU) has offered redundancies to some members of its information technology and environmental advice departments.

JCU needs to find a good amount of savings to deal with the Federal Government's decision to cut $26 million in funding.

NTEU spokesman Peter Whalley Thompson says the university’s cleaners will be made redundant too.

Teaching staff expect to find out sometime soon whether their voluntary redundancy deals have been accepted, but say the pressure has hit the whole Townsville campus in the meantime.

“All university employees are feeling the pressure at the moment of having to operate in the dark, being asked to make decisions without full information and wishing that this threat of the restructure hanging over them would be realised so they know what their futures are going to be,” Mr Thomspon told the ABC.

He says it is unclear how the savings will be made.

“They claim they're going to save $175,000 but they won't tell us how much money they're going to spend on the redundancy payments for those people,” Mr Thompson said.

“So we suspect it'll be [a] while before they save anything and this group of employees, they're some of the lowest paid people in the university, mainly women, mainly in their 60s, highly unlikely to find any other work.”

JCU has just three full-time cleaners and a number working part-time.

It says it hopes to retain one and redeploy the others, while cleaning work is outsourced.

The university says there have been no forced redundancies nor decisions for future cuts.