Insights · Layoffs
Groundwork research · Published October 20, 2026 · Data as of October 20, 2026 · 5 min read
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 3.3 million workers who lost a job they had held for three or more years between January 2023 and December 2025, 746,000 more than in the survey before. In January 2026, 66.1% of them were working again, 18.3% were unemployed and 15.7% were out of the labor force.
65.7% in January 2024
This is the Displaced Workers Supplement, which BLS runs every two years in January as part of the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of households. A displaced worker is a person 20 or older who lost or left a job because the plant or company closed or moved, there was too little work or the position or shift was abolished. BLS focuses on the 3.3 million who had been in the job three years or longer; another 4.1 million had held theirs for less, so 7.4 million lost a job in all.
Reason for the job loss, share of 3.3 million long-tenured workers
The shares working again ran from 54.6% for workers who lost a job in accommodation and food services to 77.1% in health care and social assistance. Educational services had the highest share still unemployed in January 2026, 36.5%. Working again can mean a different industry: BLS reports the industry of the lost job and says nothing of the new one.
Share working again in January 2026, by industry of the lost job
BLS prints no rates for wholesale trade: 66,000 workers, too few in the survey to publish them.
Each industry above with a layoff page on this site links to it, with the employers that filed notices in the past year. These figures describe workers at employers of every size; the pages list the employers that filed with a state.
By occupation group the shares ran from 59.6% (construction and extraction occupations) to 78.5% (installation, maintenance, and repair occupations). 5 of the 9 groups with rates sat within a point of the overall 66.1%.
Share working again in January 2026, by occupation group of the lost job
BLS prints no rates for farming, fishing, and forestry occupations: 19,000 workers, too few in the survey to publish them.
About 45% of the 3.3 million received written advance notice that the job would end, and 58% of those whose plant or company closed down or moved. BLS found the shares working again statistically alike with and without notice.
The layoff notices on this site are the employer's side of the same event: the advance filings that employers with roughly 100 or more employees send to a state, typically 60 days ahead. In the 12 months to October 20, 2026 they name 356,226 workers in 4,099 notices. A notice is an employer's plan and the survey is what people report happened, so neither adds to the other. How to read layoff notice data.
1.9 million of the long-tenured workers had lost a full-time wage and salary job and were working again in January 2026, and 1.6 million of them held a full-time wage and salary job. Of the reemployed full-time wage and salary workers who reported earnings on the lost job, about 49% earned as much or more than before, against about 62% in the January 2024 survey.
It is a sample of households, so each share carries a margin of error. A dash in a BLS table marks a group under 75,000 workers. From January 2026 the industry rows use the 2022 Census industry classification, so comparisons with earlier surveys are approximate. Neither the survey nor a layoff notice says how likely a given job is to end.
Figures: the January 2026 Displaced Workers Supplement to the Current Population Survey (January 2023 to December 2025), published by BLS as Worker Displacement: 2023-2025
(USDL-26-1423, released August 27, 2026); tables
3,
4 and
5, each value as BLS prints it and read on October 20, 2026. The occupation groups and industries are BLS's own.
Layoff notices: the open WARN Notice Register, counted as the layoff pages count them (a repeat once, a notice the register labels left out), October 21, 2025 to October 20, 2026.
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