Who's cutting in the US

Shaded vertical bands mark US recessions as dated by the National Bureau of Economic Research. With short windows the bands only appear when the 2020 contraction falls in view.

What WARN covers, and doesn't

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (29 U.S.C. § 2101) requires employers with 100+ full-time employees to file 60-day advance notice of: (a) plant closings affecting 50+ employees at a single site, or (b) mass layoffs of 50+ employees at a single site within 30 days, or 33%+ of the workforce. Most layoffs happen below either threshold; smaller employers and below-threshold events are excluded entirely. Cross-referencing BLS Business Employment Dynamics (~5-6M gross job losses per quarter in normal times) against published WARN tallies (~200-400k workers noticed per quarter nationwide), WARN captures roughly 4-8% of all gross job losses by worker count and ~25-40% of mass-layoff-equivalent events. This page is the WARN slice, not the total layoff picture.

Filing date vs effective date

WARN requires 60-day notice (with narrow statutory exemptions for unforeseen business circumstances, natural disasters, and faltering companies). A filing dated today is generally for a layoff approximately 60 days out. The timeline chart's x-axis is filing date, not effective date, so the daily "workers affected" count reflects when the notice was filed, not when workers actually leave.

Rescissions and amendments

WARN filings can be amended or rescinded. California's EDD WARN dashboard explicitly carries an "Updated Workers Affected" column; other states are less structured. This page treats the most recent filing as authoritative; if a notice gets walked back after our last scrape, we'll still show the original number until the next refresh.

State coverage

We currently have data for 43 states + DC (44 jurisdictions). Missing: Arkansas, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, plus Puerto Rico. Direct per-state scrapers cover CA, NY, TX, WA; the rest comes via the Kadoa public WARN aggregator. The seven missing states accounted for ~4% of US private- sector employment in 2024 per BLS QCEW, so their absence is a small but non-zero distortion on the national ranking; if you're looking at one of the missing states, expect zero filings rather than a true reading.

Series IDs and refresh

• WARN Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, 29 U.S.C. § 2101. Per-state dashboards or CSVs; the aggregator dump is a static JSON published by Kadoa under MIT license, sourced from public state filings.
• SOON Country-level OECD layoff and separations rates (already on /market/employment as layoffs-rate), plus statutory filings analogous to WARN where they exist (EU collective-redundancy notices in some member states, Korean MOEL notices, etc.).

Daily refresh across every covered state board; state revision windows differ. Filings are deduped by employer, site, and filing date, then rolled up by week for the timeline and by state for the map and region ranking.