Insights · Data guide
Groundwork research · Published October 19, 2026 · Updated October 20, 2026 · Data as of October 20, 2026 · 15 min read
A WARN notice is the advance warning an employer files before it closes a site or lays off a large group of workers. The federal WARN Act sets the basic rules, and each state publishes the notices it receives. In the 12 months to October 20, 2026, the state lists in our copy held 4,160 listings. Once a notice listed twice counts once and the notices the register labels are left out, they make 4,099 notices that name 356,226 workers. This guide explains what the notices can say and what they leave to other records, what the law requires, where the notices are posted, what each record holds, why some notices are missing and how we count the rest. Every page, export and email of ours that quotes a layoff count links here.
A WARN notice is an employer's advance filing with a state. What it holds is specific, and so are the questions it leaves to other records.
A count of notices reflects the law, each state's practice and the dates a list was copied, as well as layoffs. The reasons, each set out in its own section below:
Every count on our layoff pages, in our reports and exports, in our emails and in our articles follows two rules.
A notice counts once. 33 listings in the year repeat an earlier listing's state, employer, notice date, effective date, headcount and site. The site text is compared after spacing, punctuation and a county added at the end are set aside, and a listing with no site text never counts as a repeat. The earliest listing we saw is the notice and the others are left out, which removes 2,663 workers from the year's total. New York accounts for 32 of them: the register links New York's notices to dol.ny.gov and public.tableau.com, and a notice that sits on both pages is listed twice.
A notice the register labels is listed and left out of the totals. The register marks the notices it can identify as an amendment of an earlier notice, rescinded, averted, outside WARN, suspended, followed by a successor employer hiring the workers, or ended without a layoff, and leaves them out of its headline totals: 2,256 of its 90,530 notices as of October 18, 2026. We follow it. A labelled notice stays on its employer's page with its label beside it, and it is in no count, chart or alert.
The register publishes its labels in its rolling 90-day file, so our copy reads them as that file passes by. It has read labels for 857 notices, those dated from July 22, 2026 onward, most recently on October 20, 2026, and 28 notices dated in the year carry one: 16 outside WARN, 11 amended, 1 averted. A notice older than the window has no label, so the older a notice is, the likelier a count includes an amendment or a notice since withdrawn. 857 of the year's 4,160 listings have been read (21%).
How much can the unread part hold? In the 12 months to October 19, 2026 the register left out 95 notices that name 7,900 workers, 2.3% of its notices and 2.1% of its workers. We have read 28 of them, which name 2,351 workers, so up to 67 notices that name 5,549 workers can still sit in the part of our year that carries no label yet.
WARN stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. A covered employer gives 60 days of written notice before a plant closing or a mass layoff. The notice goes to the affected workers or their union, to the state's rapid response unit and to the chief elected official of the local government (29 U.S.C. 2102). Most states post the notices they receive.
There is no national list. The WARN Notice Register collects the state lists in one file, and our layoff pages are built on that file: 978 employers have a page that lists their notices with the state's own link.
The federal rules are in 20 CFR 639.3. In plain terms:
The notice to the state and the local official names the site, a company contact, whether the action is permanent or temporary, the first separation date and schedule, the job titles affected with a count for each, bumping rights and any unions (20 CFR 639.7). Our records hold an employer, a place, up to two dates and a headcount.
States add rules of their own. California covers a plant closure that affects any number of employees, a layoff of 50 or more employees whatever share of the workforce they are, and a relocation of 100 miles or more, at establishments that employed 75 or more people in the past year (California EDD). New York asks private businesses with 50 or more full-time employees for 90 days of notice and counts closings that affect 25 or more employees (New York State Department of Labor).
Those rules show in the data. 946 of California's 1,429 notices with a headcount in the year name fewer than 50 workers, and so do 281 of New York's 370. Across all states, 1,915 of the 4,003 notices with a headcount name fewer than 50.
Each state posts its own list in its own format, and the formats change. New York stopped adding notices to its older database on April 1, 2025 and posts them in a WARN Dashboard. Our records link each notice to the page it came from, and the links reach 54 different sites. The largest:
Georgia's notices reach us as files on dropbox.com (724) and pages of tcsg.edu (221). 11,777 notices in 11 states link to an Internet Archive copy of a state page. 11,721 notices carry no link, and all of them are California's. The register holds no listings for Arkansas, New Hampshire, West Virginia and Wyoming.
A record in our copy has up to seven fields, built from each state's list. A field is empty when the state publishes nothing for it.
Our records hold no job titles, no worker names and no reason for the layoff.
1,915 notices name fewer than 50 workers, 1,063 name 50 to 99, 941 name 100 to 499 and 84 name 500 or more, 26 of them 1,000 or more. 96 notices name no headcount, so every worker total here is a floor. By type, 1,712 are mass layoffs, 1,400 are closures and 987 carry no type.
Workers named in notices by state, October 21, 2025 to October 20, 2026
California filed 1,429 of the year's 4,099 notices. Washington filed 147 that name 34,127 workers. A count of notices and a count of workers describe different things, and the state rules above shape both.
A notice can carry two dates: the day the employer filed it and the day the first separations are expected. A state can publish either one, both or neither. In our copy, 59% of listings carry a notice date, 91% an effective date and 96% at least one. 12 states carry no notice date at all: Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. 10 carry no effective date: Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Vermont. Our pages show the notice date and fall back to the effective date, and each listing says which one it shows, such as "notice Mar 2026" or "effective Mar 2026".
Headcounts follow the same pattern. 97% of listings name a headcount, and Hawaii and Oklahoma name none at all. Histories differ in length too. Oregon's list reaches back to 1989 and Illinois's to 1994, while Michigan's starts in 2024 and Pennsylvania's in 2023, so a state's total across all years compares how long it has published as much as how many layoffs it has had. 6 listings carry an effective date more than 180 days ahead, up to February 1, 2028. A notice whose only date lies that far out stays off our pages, since such dates are often typos.
Every listing in our copy, by state, as the state publishes it: how many listings a state has and from which year, the share of them that carry each field, and the notices dated in the year.
The employer on a notice is the legal entity that filed it. 3,944 listings, or 4.6%, carry a second name in the filed name, marked "dba", "c/o", "f/k/a", "n/k/a" or "formerly". One filing entity shows how this reads: Brinker International Payroll Company, L.P. files under that name in California and New York, and in Washington the filed name reads "Brinker International Payroll Co LP, Maggiano's Little Italy Restaurant".
One brand can appear under many spellings. 95 different filed names in the year contain the word Amazon, among them "Amazon" (29 notices), "Amazonfresh LLC" (10) and "Amazon (Long Island)" (2), plus site codes. Our layoff pages group the names on a hand-approved family list, and the Amazon page counts 107 notices naming 16,636 workers. A name outside the list counts as its own employer. Searching by the legal name printed on a notice finds notices that the brand name misses.
A list is current only as far as its state and the register have caught up. When we added the register's most recent 90 days to our copy on October 20, 2026, 50 notices were new to it. 33 of them carried dates before October 12, 2026, when our copy was last updated: from 1 to 73 days earlier, and 12 days earlier at the median. The states with the most were Tennessee, California, Georgia, New York, Delaware and Iowa. The newest weeks of any list are the least complete.
States also revise notices. 40 filed names in our copy begin with the state's revision flag, "UPDATED" or "UPDATE", across 53 listings (Massachusetts 44, Ohio 8 and Hawaii 1). Other states overwrite the earlier row or add a second one. The register labels the notices it can identify as amended, rescinded, averted or outside WARN and leaves them out of its headline totals: 2,256 of its 90,530 notices as of October 18, 2026. Our totals follow it where our copy has read a label, and count a listing that repeats an earlier one once: what we count.
A notice states a plan on the day it is filed. The layoff can happen on another date, at another size or never: the register labels 63 notices averted and 50 rescinded. Employers with fewer than 100 employees and layoffs below the thresholds file no notice under the federal law, and state laws reach some of them.
Job titles sit in the notice letter. The federal rule asks the notice to the state to list the job titles of the positions affected and how many employees hold each (20 CFR 639.7), and states post the letters beside their lists. The register copies the list and keeps no title, so a count of notices says how many workers an employer expects to lose and leaves the roles to the letter. Two Washington letters we opened in October 2026 show how much the letters vary: one is a text exhibit headed "Position Title", and the other is a set of scanned pages.
For scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 1.6 million layoffs and discharges in August 2026 alone (JOLTS), about 4.5 times the 356,226 workers named in a year of notices in our copy. A bigger employer files more notices, so a count of notices reflects size and reporting rules as well as layoffs.
Reporters can download the year's notices as a file from the press page.
A notice is the employer's advance filing. The layoff follows on the effective date unless the employer changes the plan, and the register labels the notices it knows ended without one.
Federal law asks for 60 days. New York asks covered private businesses for 90 days.
Employers with fewer than 100 employees and layoffs below the thresholds file none under federal law. State laws reach some of them.
A page exists for each employer with notices for 100 or more workers, or with three or more notices, in the year. A smaller filer, or a company filing under a legal name we have yet to tie to its brand, appears under another name.
A listing that repeats an earlier one counts once, and a notice the register labels as amended, rescinded or outside WARN is listed with its label and left out of the counts. The state's list can also hold notices under a name we group with another employer. What we count sets out both rules.
The lists carry no job title, industry or reason. The notice letter can name job titles, and states post letters in different forms, so reading titles takes the letter itself. A company's own wage filings and hiring records describe the jobs it hires for, which differ from the jobs it cuts. What a notice leaves out.
Layoff notices: the open WARN Notice Register, a consolidated copy of the listings state workforce agencies publish, current through October 20, 2026
(86,027 listings in 46 states and DC). A notice counts in the 12 months ending that date by its event date: the notice date, or the
effective date when that is all a state gives. Employers are grouped by name, with a company family counted as one employer. Revision flags are filed names that begin with
UPDATED, UPDATE or an asterisked form of them. A repeated listing is one that shares an earlier listing's state, employer name, notice date, effective date, headcount and site
text, ignoring spacing, punctuation and a county added at the end; a listing with no site text is never counted as a repeat. The listing first seen in our copy is the notice, and
the repeats are in no count. A notice carrying a label in the register's headline_excluded field is listed and in no count. The shares of listings that carry a date, a headcount, a
type or a link, and the list of states, describe every listing as the states publish it, repeats and labelled notices included. The register's totals are quoted from its published
data as read on October 19, 2026, and the BLS figure from its news release of September 29, 2026. Built by scripts/build_insights.py.
Sources: WARN Notice Register; DOL WARN page; 29 U.S.C. 2102; 20 CFR 639.3; 20 CFR 639.7; California EDD; New York State Department of Labor; BLS JOLTS news release.
Informational only; not legal, immigration, or financial advice.
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