Federal law requires employers with 100 or more full-time employees to provide 60 days of advance notice before laying off 50 or more workers at a single site. The notice goes to affected workers, the state government, and the local elected official. Most states then publish the notice on a public website. This is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act — WARN, enacted in 1988 — and it remains among the least-recognized worker-protection statutes in federal labor law.
JobShift consolidates WARN filings from 49 state portals into a single dataset, updated daily. This guide describes how the filings work, what they contain, where the data is reliable, and where it is not.
What WARN actually requires
The federal WARN Act covers private employers with 100 or more full-time employees. When one of those employers is about to shut down a site with 50 or more workers, or lay off 50 or more workers who make up at least a third of a single site's headcount (or lay off 500 or more workers regardless of that percentage), the employer owes 60 calendar days of written notice. The notice is transmitted to the affected workers, to a specific unit inside the state's labor department, and to the local elected official.
The statute's scope is narrower than the label suggests. WARN does not mandate severance. Employers are not required to offer alternative employment, and the law does not prevent the layoff itself. The sole requirement is written notification, two months in advance.
Some states have enacted stricter versions, commonly referred to as "mini-WARN" laws, which lower the employee threshold, extend the notice period, or add severance requirements. California, New York, and New Jersey are frequently cited examples, though the specific thresholds vary by state and are amended periodically. Current requirements should be verified on the relevant state labor-department website rather than through any third-party summary, including this one.
The federal penalty for inadequate notice is back pay and benefits for each day of shortfall. Enforcement in practice is uneven. Collection typically requires civil litigation by the affected workers, and the penalty is rarely sufficient to deter a company that has already committed to closing a facility.
What appears on the form (and what does not)
Every filing contains the employer's legal name, a specific site address, the number of workers affected, the layoff type (temporary, permanent, or plant closing), and two dates: the notice-filing date and the date the first worker actually separates.
Two structural quirks matter for anyone searching WARN data. First, the legal name on the filing rarely matches the consumer brand. Filings for the company behind Google appear as "Google LLC." Meta files as "Meta Platforms, Inc." X (formerly Twitter) files as "X Corp." A thorough search covers the parent, the LLC, the operating subsidiary, and any "-Services, LLC" variant.
Second, the same parent company frequently files under different subsidiary names in different states. A national employer's California filing may not match its Texas filing even when both cover the same headcount action. State DOL naming conventions do not prioritize search convenience across jurisdictions.
What is absent from a WARN filing is often more consequential than what is present. The forms do not include a reason for the layoff. Most states do not ask for one, and the states that do accept "economic conditions" without follow-up. This is why WARN data alone cannot answer whether a given layoff was driven by AI adoption, over-hiring, or general business contraction. That determination has to be reconstructed from earnings calls, news coverage, and executive statements. JobShift performs that reconstruction on top of the raw filings.
Also absent from the filings: severance amounts, confirmation of whether workers actually received the full 60 days of pay, and any rehire commitments. The filing is a notice, not a contract, and no follow-up reporting is required once it is submitted.
Fifty states, fifty ways
Publication quality varies substantially across states. California, New York, Washington, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina maintain clean HTML tables on their DOL sites and update them within days of receiving a filing. These jurisdictions are the primary sources for layoff journalism because the data is straightforwardly accessible.
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Alabama, and several other states take the opposite approach: one PDF per filing, sometimes scanned rather than text-native. Extracting structured data requires OCR, which is largely reliable but occasionally garbles numbers and text.
Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Maryland publish Excel or CSV. This format eliminates parsing ambiguity and is preferable from a data-consumer perspective.
Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas, and Arkansas publish with a 30-to-60-day lag between filing and public availability. Data described as "recent" for those states is often stale by the time it appears publicly.
Two states — New Hampshire and Wyoming — do not publish proactively. Both accept WARN filings, since federal law still applies, but neither posts them on a public portal. Access requires a public-records request to the state's workforce agency. On JobShift, the pages for those states include a disclosure explaining that no public WARN filing portal exists, because the underlying data cannot be consolidated without direct records requests.
For direct access to a specific state's filings, a search for "[state name] WARN notices" typically returns the DOL page as the top result.
Why WARN alone does not tell the full story
Even a real-time, all-51-jurisdiction WARN dataset would miss most of what the term "layoffs" ordinarily denotes. The gap is likely closer to ten-to-one, and probably wider.
Small employers are exempt from the statute. A 40-person startup that shuts down files no WARN. A 90-person team that is absorbed into another organization with half of the roles cut files no WARN.
Rolling layoffs stay under the trigger threshold. A company can shed 40 workers in one month, 45 in the next, and 40 in the third at the same site while filing zero notices, because no single 30-day window crosses the 50-worker threshold. Some large-employer layoffs announced as "1,200 people over the next year, in waves" appear structured to avoid the WARN threshold. Proving intent in each case is impossible, but the pattern recurs often enough to name.
Firings for cause, resignations, voluntary separation programs, retirements, and contract non-renewals never appear in WARN data. Neither do contractor terminations. WARN covers W-2 employees only, so a company cutting 200 contract engineers files nothing. Executive severances also fall outside the law's scope.
WARN captures the visible, structured, legally-mandated tip of a much larger iceberg. It is the best publicly-available signal of large-employer behavior, but it misses nearly everything below the top layer. The JobShift dataset combines WARN with news coverage of layoffs (which captures sub-threshold events and contractor cuts) and with job-posting data (which indicates where AI hiring is occurring — a related but distinct question).
Practical uses of the dataset
For monitoring a specific employer, the state's WARN portal can be searched directly for the employer's legal name and every plausible variant. The data is public and requires no third-party service to access. If the employer has filed, the notice is available. If not, either no layoff is imminent, or the reduction is structured to stay under the WARN threshold. Both outcomes are common.
For monitoring an industry rather than a single company, WARN filings cluster geographically in the metros where the industry concentrates. When one employer in a sector files, others within a 20-mile radius often file within weeks. That clustering is typically a stronger signal than any single filing.
The consolidated 49-state view with AI attribution layered on top is what JobShift provides. Every filing on the site links back to the original state source URL, so any number can be independently verified.
WARN is a modest statute by international standards. Two months of notice, no requirement to prevent the layoff, uneven enforcement, and substantial coverage gaps. It exists, however, it is public, and reading it accurately is a meaningful component of workforce transparency in an economy with limited employment protections.