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 2026-09-14. 299 state-years across 48 states; 34,379 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: 61,309 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 2026-09-14; 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:

• 525 field-level changes, logged every day since 2026-08-31. data/revisions.csv records each time a state agency edited a notice after publishing it — employee counts, effective dates, notice types, company names — with the old value, the new value and the date we saw the change. A scrape that starts tomorrow cannot backfill this; 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 →

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

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.}