The gap, stated plainly
The newest month our county risk score can describe is July 2026, because county unemployment data publishes on a lag. Since then, through the date this was checked, we logged 464 WARN layoff notices nationally. We could match 401 of them to a county that had a July 2026 score; the other 63 lacked a county code in the source filing and are not counted here rather than guessed at.
Of the 401 matched notices, 211 landed in counties scored LOW that month and 167 in counties scored MODERATE — 378 notices, 94.3 percent, in counties our own data was not flagging as risky as of its newest reading. Only 21 landed in HIGH counties and 2 in CRITICAL. In worker terms the pattern holds: roughly 19,900 affected workers sit in the LOW and MODERATE group against roughly 3,400 in HIGH and CRITICAL combined.
Why this is not a failure of the score
This is not evidence the score is wrong about July. It is the lag doing exactly what a lag does. A WARN notice filed in September describes a decision made in September. July's unemployment trend had no way to see it coming, because it hadn't happened yet. The gap between "the newest trend we can measure" and "the newest decision an employer has made" is the whole reason WARN filings exist as a separate, faster signal in the first place — we said as much when we wrote about the eleven-week lag on its own.
What this result adds is a number for how much that gap can hide. If a quarter of counties sit in our two highest bands at any given time — and they do, by construction — you might expect new layoff activity to show up there at something close to that rate. Instead less than 6 percent of matched notices did. Most of the quarter's visible layoff activity is happening in counties the lagging series had not yet flagged.
One confound worth naming
We have not controlled for county size here, and we should say so rather than let the number travel unqualified. Larger counties file more WARN notices simply by having more employers, and a county's risk tier is not the same thing as its population. Some of the LOW-scored counties absorbing these notices may simply be large, which would produce a similar pattern even in a world where risk tier and new layoff activity were otherwise unrelated. We are not claiming otherwise — we are reporting where the notices landed, not why.
How to use this
Treat a WARN notice and a county risk score as two different clocks. The score tells you, with a published lag, how a county's broader labour trend compares to the rest of the country. A WARN notice tells you, often in real time, that one employer has made one decision. Checking both against a specific county, rather than trusting either alone, is the actual workflow — not a sales line, just what this result shows directly. We are not claiming WARN notices give you a specific amount of advance warning here; the underlying filings do not carry a reliable lead-time field in our table, so we are not putting a number on that.