The federal WARN Act requires 60 days' notice for qualifying mass layoffs and plant closings. Many states have their own version with a lower threshold or a longer notice period. Every one of those notices ends up with a state agency, and almost every agency publishes them.
So the data is free. Getting it is not the hard part.
The hard part is that every state publishes differently
California posts a rolling report through the EDD — the largest single source by volume. We hold 4,060 California filings, more than half of everything we track.
New Jersey publishes an export that is straightforward to parse. 2,182 filings.
New York publishes its own format. 201. Utah, 275. Maryland, 95. Nebraska, 47.
Six states, six formats, six update cadences, and six different definitions of which fields are mandatory. Some publish the county. Some publish only a city, and the county is your problem. Some publish an effective date; some publish a notice date and leave you to work out the difference.
Anyone can download all six. Reconciling them into one comparable list is the work — and it is the part that has to be redone every time an agency changes its export.
What a notice does not tell you
A WARN filing is a notice log. It was designed to tell a workforce board that a layoff is coming so it can stage re-employment services. It was not designed to help you assess anything.
Three things it will not tell you:
Whether the notice period is short. The filing gives you dates. Whether the gap between them falls under the required period is arithmetic you have to do — per state, because the requirement differs.
Where it sits against everything else. A 200-person layoff means something different in a county with a diversified labour market than in one where a single employer dominates. The notice contains no context at all.
Whether the date has passed. A file downloaded today contains filings whose layoff dates are years old alongside ones that have not happened yet. We hold filings dated from 2004 through October 2026 — the future-dated ones are the only ones where anything can still be done.
What we actually do with them
We take the public filings, normalise them to a common shape, resolve them to a county, and score that county against our displacement data. What you get is the same public record, plus the county context and the ranking, plus the arithmetic on notice periods already done.
We currently cover six states and 80 counties. That is a real limit and worth stating plainly: if your practice is in a state we do not hold, this is not for you yet.
Pricing is flat and per-item: a single lead unlock is $149. The monthly subscription is $299.
The honest caveat about volume
You will see services advertise large filing counts. Count employers, not filings. A single healthcare system closing four sites files four notices; a company with three programme closures files three. Our own recent data has stretches where a handful of employers account for most of a week's filings. The number of filings is not the number of opportunities, and anyone selling you on filing count alone is selling you the wrong metric.