Frequently Asked Questions

A WARN notice is a written notification required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988. Employers must file one at least 60 days before a covered plant closing or mass layoff. The notice goes to affected employees (or their union representatives), the state dislocated worker unit, and the chief elected official of local government.

The federal WARN Act applies to employers with 100 or more full-time employees, not counting workers who have been there fewer than 6 months or who average fewer than 20 hours per week. Private companies, nonprofits, and public entities operating in a commercial capacity are all covered. Regular government agencies providing public services are exempt.

Two types of events require a WARN notice:

Plant closing: A shutdown of a single employment site (or a facility within one) that results in job loss for 50 or more employees during any 30-day period.

Mass layoff: A reduction in force at a single site that is not a plant closing, affecting either (a) 500 or more employees, or (b) 50 to 499 employees if they make up at least one-third of the workforce at that site.

Several states have their own WARN-style laws with stricter requirements than the federal version. For example, California covers employers with 75 or more employees (vs. 100 federal). New York requires 90 days of advance notice instead of 60. Ohio enacted its own mini-WARN in September 2025. These state laws may cover smaller employers or require longer notice periods. When both federal and state laws apply, the employer must meet whichever standard is stricter.

A closure means the facility is shutting down permanently or temporarily, and all positions at that location are being eliminated. A layoff means some positions are being cut, but the facility may remain open with a reduced workforce. Both can trigger a WARN filing if they meet the employee thresholds, but closures tend to affect more workers per filing.

There are several reasons a layoff may not appear in WARN filings. The company may have fewer than 100 full-time employees at the affected location. The layoff may have been structured to stay below the 50-employee threshold that triggers a filing. The company may have used garden leave or paid notice to satisfy the 60-day requirement without a public filing appearing when you expect it. Or the state may not have published the filing yet. For a full explanation, see our guide: Why some layoffs don't appear in WARN filings.

Garden leave (also called paid non-working notice) is when an employer tells you your job is ending but keeps you on payroll for 60 or more days with no work duties. Because you remain employed and paid, this can satisfy the WARN Act's 60-day notice requirement. The filing may appear on the date you were informed, not the date your employment actually ends, which can confuse people searching for recent layoffs.

Yes. If a company distributes layoffs across multiple locations so that no single site crosses the 50-employee threshold, no WARN filing is required. This is legal and relatively common among large employers with many locations. However, if two or more groups at the same site experience job losses within a 90-day window that together meet the threshold, the employer must provide WARN notice unless it can show the losses were caused by separate, unrelated actions.

Some companies file WARN notices well in advance with broad date ranges or language like "on or about" a given date. They then execute layoffs in waves over weeks or months. The notice might appear in our database months before anyone at the company actually loses their job. This is legal as long as the notice was filed at least 60 days before each wave of separations.

Yes. The WARN Act allows reduced notice in three situations: (1) Faltering company: the employer was actively seeking capital or business to stay open, and giving notice would have ruined that opportunity. (2) Unforeseeable business circumstances: the closing or layoff was caused by conditions the employer could not reasonably have predicted 60 days ahead. (3) Natural disaster: the event was directly caused by a natural disaster. In all three cases, the employer must still provide as much notice as practicable and explain why the full 60 days was not possible.

If your employer was required to file a WARN notice and failed to give the full 60 days, you may be entitled to back pay and benefits for each day of the violation, up to 60 days. This means your regular rate of pay plus the cost of any benefits (like health insurance) for the period between when you should have been notified and when you actually were. Some states impose additional penalties. In California, for example, employers may also owe $500 per day per employee for violations of the state WARN law.

Technically, paying employees for 60 days instead of giving advance notice is a WARN violation. But because the penalty for a violation is back pay for up to 60 days, an employer that pays in lieu of notice has effectively already covered the damages. The WARN Act allows voluntary, unconditional payments to be offset against any back-pay liability. However, if the severance was already required by contract, company policy, or another law, it cannot be used to offset WARN damages.

Yes, but only if the waiver is voluntary, knowing, and made with the opportunity to think about it and consult a lawyer. You must also receive something of reasonable value in exchange (consideration). If all conditions are met, the waiver eliminates your claims under WARN. If you are 40 or older, federal law gives you at least 21 days to consider a severance offer (45 days in a group termination), plus 7 days to revoke after signing.

Part-time employees (those averaging fewer than 20 hours per week) and workers employed for fewer than 6 of the past 12 months are not counted when determining whether a layoff meets the thresholds that trigger a WARN filing. However, if a qualifying plant closing or mass layoff occurs, part-time workers who lose their jobs are still entitled to receive the WARN notice itself. Temporary workers hired with the understanding that their position was limited in duration are generally not covered.

It depends. WARN still applies if the employer knew about the closing or layoff before filing for bankruptcy. It also applies when the employer continues operating the business as a debtor in possession. WARN generally does not apply when a bankruptcy trustee is simply liquidating the business. WARN claims in bankruptcy are filed in Bankruptcy Court rather than U.S. District Court, and the timing of actual payment to employees may be affected by the bankruptcy proceedings.

File as soon as possible after your last day of work. Do not wait for your severance to run out. In most states, you can file the week you become unemployed. If you received WARN pay in lieu of notice, check your state's rules, but in many states you can still file while receiving that pay. Delays in filing can cost you benefits, since most states calculate eligibility from the date of your claim, not the date of your separation.

COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) lets you continue your employer-sponsored health insurance after a layoff. You typically have 60 days from the date of your qualifying event to elect COBRA coverage, and it can last up to 18 months. You pay the full premium yourself (the employer's share plus your share), plus up to a 2% administrative fee. It is often expensive, but it provides continuity while you look for new coverage through a new employer, the ACA marketplace, or Medicaid.

Rapid Response is a federally funded program coordinated by state and local workforce boards. When a WARN notice is filed, Rapid Response teams are deployed to the affected worksite (or meet virtually) to provide job search assistance, training referrals, resume help, and information about unemployment insurance. These services are free. If your employer filed a WARN notice, your local workforce board should already be aware and preparing outreach. If not, you can contact your state's dislocated worker unit directly.

American Job Centers (also called CareerOneStop centers) provide free career counseling, resume workshops, retraining vouchers, and job search assistance. You can find the nearest location by searching on CareerOneStop's Service Locator. Many state pages on this site also include a job center finder with locations near the affected area.

All data comes from official state workforce agency websites. We run automated extractors that pull WARN filings from each state's published records daily on weekdays. The data is normalized, deduplicated, and published here. We do not use crowdsourced data, news reports, or third-party scrapers. If a state does not publish WARN data publicly, those filings will not appear here.

The pipeline runs Monday through Friday. New filings typically appear on the site within one business day of being published by the state agency. Some states update weekly or biweekly, so there can be a lag between when a notice is received by the state and when it appears in their public records.

WARN notices are filed with the state, not with employees directly. The date a state publishes a filing may differ from the date the employer told you about the layoff. In some cases, employers file the notice the same day they inform employees. In other cases, the filing appears weeks earlier (conditional notices) or later (delayed state processing). The dates shown on this site reflect what the state agency has published.

We currently extract data from 43 states. A few states do not publish WARN filings publicly (North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wyoming), and a few have technical barriers that prevent automated extraction (Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia). We continue working to expand coverage as state data becomes accessible.

No. WARNact is an independent project. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Labor, any state workforce agency, or any other government entity. We aggregate publicly available data to make it easier for workers, analysts, and researchers to access and understand WARN filings.