If an employer has 100 or more full-time employees and is about to lay off 50 or more of them at a single site, federal law requires the employer to notify those workers and the state government 60 days in advance. Most states then publish the notice on a public website. This is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act — WARN, from 1988 — and it remains one of the least-known worker-protection laws in the country.
JobShift consolidates WARN filings from 49 state portals into a single dataset, updated daily. This guide covers 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 sent to the affected workers, to a specific unit inside the state's labor department, and to the local elected official.
The law's scope is narrower than it appears. WARN does not require severance. Employers don't have to offer another job, and the law does not prevent the layoff at all. All it requires is that people get told in writing, two months ahead of time.
Some states have their own stricter versions, usually called "mini-WARN" laws, that lower the employee threshold, extend the notice period, or add severance requirements. California, New York, and New Jersey are frequently cited examples, but the specific thresholds vary by state and are amended periodically. Readers should verify current requirements on their state's labor-department website rather than rely on any third-party summary, including this one.
The federal penalty for failing to provide adequate notice is back pay and benefits for each day of shortfall. Enforcement is uneven in practice. Workers typically must file suit to collect, and the penalty is rarely large enough to deter a company that has already decided to close a facility.
What's on the form (and what isn't)
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 when searching WARN data. First, the legal name on the filing is almost never 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." Anyone searching for a specific employer should try 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. The naming conventions at each state DOL do not prioritize search convenience.
What is absent from a WARN filing is often more important than what is present. The forms do not include a reason for the layoff. Most states do not ask; the ones that do accept "economic conditions" and move on. This is why WARN alone cannot answer the question of whether a given layoff was driven by AI adoption, over-hiring, or business contraction. That determination has to be reconstructed from earnings calls, news coverage, and executive statements. JobShift does that reconstruction on top of the raw filings.
Also absent: severance amounts, whether workers actually received their full 60 days of pay or were walked out the same day, and any rehire commitments. The filing is a notice, not a contract, and once submitted there is no follow-up reporting.
Fifty states, fifty ways
Publication quality varies enormously across states. California, New York, Washington, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina maintain clean HTML tables on their state DOL sites and update them within days of receiving a filing. These are the states journalists source layoff stories from, because there is no friction to speak of.
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Alabama, and several other states go the opposite direction: one PDF per filing, sometimes scanned rather than text-native. Extracting the data requires OCR, which mostly works but occasionally garbles numbers and text.
Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Maryland publish Excel or CSV. That format eliminates parsing ambiguity and represents the ideal from a data-consumer perspective, though it is rarely acknowledged as such.
Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas, and Arkansas publish with a 30-to-60-day lag between filing and public availability. "Recent WARN data" for those states is stale by the time it appears anywhere.
Two states — New Hampshire and Wyoming — do not publish proactively at all. 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 carry a note explaining that no public WARN filing portal exists, because the underlying data cannot be consolidated without direct records requests.
To check your own state's filings, search "[state name] WARN notices." The top result is almost always the state DOL page.
Why WARN alone won't tell the full story
Even a real-time, all-51-jurisdiction WARN dataset would miss most of what people mean by "layoffs." The gap is likely closer to ten-to-one, and probably wider.
Small employers are exempt. A 40-person startup that shuts down files no WARN. A 90-person team that gets absorbed with half of the roles cut files no WARN.
Rolling layoffs stay under the trigger. A company can shed 40 workers this month, 45 next month, and 40 the month after 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 specifically 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. Contractor terminations do not either. WARN covers W-2 employees only, so a company cutting 200 contract engineers files nothing. Executive severances also fall outside the law.
WARN captures the visible, structured, legally-mandated tip of a much larger iceberg. It is the best publicly-available signal of large-employer behavior, and it misses nearly everything below that top layer. The JobShift dataset combines WARN with news coverage of layoffs (which catches sub-threshold events and contractor cuts) and with job-posting data (which shows where AI hiring is actually happening — a related but distinct question).
What you can do with this
If you are worried about a specific employer, search the state's WARN portal 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 there. If not, either no layoff is imminent, or the reduction is structured to stay under the WARN threshold. Both are common.
If you are worried about an industry rather than a single company, watch WARN clusters in the metros where that industry concentrates. Filings tend to cluster: when one employer in a sector files, others within a 20-mile radius often file within weeks. That pattern 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 weak law by international standards. Two months of notice, no requirement to prevent the layoff, uneven enforcement, and substantial coverage gaps. But it exists, it is public, and knowing how to read it is a small but real piece of leverage in an economy where employment protections are minimal.