Coverage first, because everything else depends on it
Most data products lead with what they contain. The more useful thing is usually what they do not.
| State | Filings | |---|---| | California | 4,097 | | New Jersey | 2,190 | | Utah | 275 | | New York | 205 | | Maryland | 98 | | Nebraska | 47 | | Total | 6,912 |
Filing dates run from 1 January 2004 to 30 October 2026 — the forward dates being notices whose stated separation date is still in the future, which is the whole point of a WARN notice.
That is six states, not fifty. If your question concerns Texas, Illinois, Ohio or Florida, this dataset will answer it with silence, and silence is not the same as "no layoffs happened."
Why the distribution is so lopsided
California and New Jersey are 91% of the holdings. That is not sampling bias in the collection — it reflects two real things.
State WARN laws differ. Several states have their own "mini-WARN" statutes with lower employee thresholds and broader triggers than the federal Act, so more events become notifiable. California and New Jersey both have notably broad regimes.
Publication practice differs more. Some states publish a clean, structured, regularly updated list. Others publish a PDF occasionally. Others publish nothing and answer records requests. The federal Act creates the obligation to notify; it does not create a tidy national registry, and there isn't one.
What the data is good for
- Finding the specific employer. Unlike an aggregate indicator, a WARN filing names a company, a location, and a worker count. It is evidence about one firm. - Short-notice detection. The federal Act generally requires 60 days. Filings whose notice period falls short of that are visible in the data, and they are the ones that matter most to a plaintiff-side attorney. - Timing. Because notices are forward-looking, a filing is a statement about something that has not fully happened yet.
What it is not good for
- National conclusions. Six states cannot support "layoffs are rising in America." - Counting jobs lost. Worker counts on notices are estimates made in advance, and the eventual number is frequently different. - Anything below the threshold. WARN applies to larger employers and larger events. A firm of forty people closing entirely will typically never appear, no matter how real it was.
The part everyone gets wrong
A WARN notice is a notice. It is not a confirmation that anything happened. Notices get withdrawn, amended, postponed, and superseded. Treating a filing as a completed layoff will overstate reality — sometimes badly, in periods where a lot of notices are precautionary.
When we hold a record, we hold what was filed and when. Whether the event occurred as described is a separate question, and one the filing cannot answer.
Coverage expands, and we will say so when it does
Six states is where the holdings stand on 21 September 2026. Several more publish in formats that are machine-readable and several publish in formats that actively resist it. When coverage changes, the number in the header of a post like this one changes with it — which is why these posts carry a date and a count rather than an adjective.