Federal law requires 60 days notice before mass layoffs. Most companies don't give it. Here's what the law actually says and what the data shows.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act has been federal law since 1988. It requires employers with 100 or more workers to give 60 days advance notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. The notice goes to affected workers, their union representatives if applicable, and state and local government officials.
Sixty days. In writing. Before the layoff happens.
In practice, the law is honored more in the breach. Companies discover loopholes, issue notices the day of the layoff, or ignore the requirement entirely and pay the statutory penalty — which works out to 60 days of back pay per affected worker, often cheaper than the PR cost of announcing a layoff two months early.
The Separation Index tracks WARN Act filings because they are public record and because they tell you something important: when a company files a WARN notice, the layoff is confirmed, the date is documented, and the scale is on the record. No rumor, no anonymous source, no spokesperson declining to comment.
What the law actually covers
WARN applies to employers with 100 or more full-time employees. A covered layoff is either a plant closing (shutting a facility that employs 50 or more workers) or a mass layoff (cutting at least 500 workers, or at least 50 workers if that represents 33 percent of the workforce at a single site).
Part-time workers — defined as those working fewer than 20 hours per week — don't count toward the thresholds. This exclusion has become a structuring tool.
The notice must go to affected workers individually, their union if there is one, the state dislocated worker unit, and the chief elected official of the local government where the layoff is happening. It must include the expected date of the first layoff, whether the layoff is permanent or temporary, and the job titles and classifications of affected workers.
The exceptions companies use
Three statutory exceptions allow companies to give less than 60 days notice or none at all.
The faltering company exception applies when a company is seeking capital or business that would avoid the shutdown and believes that giving notice would prevent it from getting that capital. It's narrow by design and has been successfully invoked in bankruptcy contexts.
The unforeseeable business circumstances exception covers sudden, dramatic changes that were not reasonably foreseeable 60 days out — a major customer canceling a contract, an unexpected government action, a market collapse. This exception gets stretched.
The natural disaster exception is self-explanatory and genuinely intended for its stated purpose.
When none of these exceptions apply but a company gives less than 60 days notice anyway, it owes affected workers back pay and benefits for the gap. The WARN Act has no punitive damages — you can recover what you lost, not more. That calculus sometimes makes violation cheaper than compliance.
What we track and why
Every state that collects WARN filings makes them public. We've aggregated filings across multiple states, with national coverage expanding. Every filing is searchable by company, date, city, and worker count.
For workers who were laid off, the WARN database tells you whether your employer was legally required to give notice and whether they did. For job seekers, it tells you which companies in your target industry or region have had recent workforce reductions — not as a disqualifying factor, but as context for conversations about stability and trajectory.
For anyone submitting a separation report on The Separation Index, linking your report to the relevant WARN filing corroborates your account with public government data.
The compliance picture
Of the filings in our current database, a significant share show advance notice of fewer than 60 days — including a meaningful number that show same-day or next-day notice. Whether those reflect legitimate exceptions or technical violations depends on facts we don't have, and we're not in the business of making legal determinations.
What we can say is that the WARN Act's design — public notice, on the record, with worker information — was intended to create accountability for mass layoffs. The database makes that accountability findable for the first time in a consumer-facing format.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor WARN Act filings. All data is a matter of public record.
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