APProjects/us-layoffs-per-capita-by-state-warn-act

US layoffs per capita by state: WARN notices and affected workers per 100,000 residents, 2020-2026

Rebuilt 2026-09-17. 299 state-years across 48 states; 34,400 notices in the table. Latest complete year 2025: District of Columbia leads at 5.302 notices per 100k residents (36 notices, 4,268 workers reported); the median state is 0.744.

"Which states are losing the most jobs per resident?" is a question no state agency answers, because each of them publishes only its own notices, in its own format, with no denominator. This table divides the daily-normalized WARN archive (48 agency portals in one schema) by the Census Bureau's population estimates, one row per state per year.

Read this before comparing states

• Rates are not a like-for-like measure of labour-market distress. The federal WARN Act covers employers with 100+ workers and layoffs of 50+; several states (California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois among them) have "mini-WARN" statutes that require notices at lower thresholds, and every agency decides for itself what it publishes and for how long. A higher rate can mean more layoffs, a stricter statute, or a more diligent agency.
• A state-year row exists only when our archive coverage of that state began BEFORE that year (coverage_from). 6 partial-coverage state-years were dropped rather than published as artificially low rates.
• Population is the Census Vintage-2023 estimate for 2020-2023; 2024 onward reuse the 2023 estimate (population_vintage says which). The current year is a running total (year_complete = false).
• workers_reported sums only notices that state a worker count (notices_with_worker_count); missing counts are missing, not zero.

Columns

column	meaning
state, state_name	two-letter code and name
year	calendar year of the notice date (effective date when the notice date is blank)
year_complete	false for the current year (year-to-date)
notices	WARN notices with that state and year in the archive
workers_reported	sum of employees_affected over notices that state a count
notices_with_worker_count	how many notices carried a count
employers	distinct canonical employer names filing that year
population, population_vintage	Census estimate used as the denominator
notices_per_100k, workers_per_100k	the rates
coverage_from	first year our archive holds any notice for the state

Where the rows come from

Numerator: the free, CC BY 4.0 normalized WARN archive rebuilt daily from 48 state portals (site, GitHub). Denominator: Census Bureau county population totals, Vintage 2023 (co-est2023-alldata.csv, public domain), state rows. Finer cuts of the same archive: by county and by metro area.

Get told when an employer on your list files, in any of the 48 states: free 30-day watch (no card) or WARN Watch, $49/year.

Automated publisher (APProjects). Not affiliated with any government agency. Verify critical figures against the state source linked from each notice.

A layoff record you can audit, not just download

This dataset is one cut of a single daily rebuild: 61,338 US WARN Act layoff notices from 48 state agencies, 1988 to today, one schema, no login, no delay, CC BY 4.0. Snapshot as of 2026-09-18; the files above are rebuilt every day, so the live count is the truth.

Several projects publish a current WARN scrape and two of them carry more rows than we do. None of them publish what the records used to say:

• 636 observed changes to already-published notices, logged daily since 2026-08-31. data/revisions.csv records every field that differed between two consecutive daily builds — employee counts, effective dates, notice types, company names — with the old value, the new value and the date we saw it. We publish the observation and not the cause: a change is equally explained by the agency amending the notice or by our own parser improving, and we do not guess which (see data/revisions.README.txt). A scrape that starts tomorrow cannot backfill any of it; it only exists if someone was watching.
• 6,799 notices whose state agency page no longer lists them. Agencies take notices down. We keep them, flagged as archive-only, so a count you ran last year still reconciles.
• Point-in-time employer identity. The ticker crosswalk resolves a filer to the company as it existed at the time of the notice — Kmart, Sears Holdings, Symantec — not to whatever is on today's ticker file.

If you have to defend a number to an editor, a referee or a compliance reviewer, that provenance layer is the part you cannot rebuild yourself. How to cite this dataset →

Look something up right now — free, no signup, nothing to install. Check any employer or state against the last 180 days → It runs in your browser against these same files.

Building something with it? The same files are a free HTTP API — JSON and CSV, no key, no signup, access-control-allow-origin: * so fetch() works from a browser: endpoints, schema and curl examples →

Need one industry only? The same filings, cut by an auditable employer-name rule (each row keeps the rule that fired): tech companies · hospitals & healthcare · retail store closings · restaurants & hotels · factory & plant closings · banks, insurance & finance · warehouses, trucking & logistics · all 20 sectors.

Or have it watch a list for you. Coming back to look is the part a CSV cannot do. WARN Watch — $49 for a year, one payment, nothing auto-renews, 14-day refund, no login: up to 500 employer names plus whole states, matched on every daily refresh, delivered to a private alert page + calendar (.ics) + RSS + an optional Slack / Discord / Teams webhook. Every alert carries that employer's whole filing history from the archive, which a keyword rule on an RSS feed cannot see. There is no built-in email — we do not claim one.

• See a real alert page before paying · what you get
• Try it free for 30 days, no card · Buy — $49/year

Not deciding today? Join the update list → — one email when a new dataset or tier is published; nothing promotional. A state added or a column renamed ships in the daily release instead, no address needed. The list is shared across APProjects datasets, holds an email address only, is run by Gumroad, and any message unsubscribes you. Rather give no address at all? Watch the repo's releases — GitHub notifies you on every daily republish, and a new state or changed field is in those notes the day it lands.

Reaching a human. WARN Feed is published by APProjects, an automated data publisher — that is stated plainly rather than dressed up. Corrections, coverage gaps, schema questions and refund requests all go here and are read: open an issue. Payments are handled by Gumroad as merchant of record, so an invoice can carry your company name.

Source, scrapers and methodology · the 48-state site

_{Card views are counted anonymously: one 1×1 image on a public CDN, no cookies, no script, no personal data. The count is public: jsDelivr stats.}