States Ranked by WARN Act Activity

Every U.S. state ranked by the number of WARN Act mass-layoff notices on file — a measure of how often layoffs happen, distinct from how many workers they hit. High counts tend to track large, industrially diverse economies like California, Texas, and New York, but they also reflect each state's reporting rigor: states with their own "mini-WARN" laws and active rapid-response units capture smaller events that the federal 100-employee, 500-worker thresholds would miss. Read this alongside the workers-affected ranking — many small filings and a few giant ones tell very different stories about a state's job market.

Rank State Workers Affected
1 Texas 273,933
2 Washington 230,935
3 California 197,418
4 Oregon 63,082
5 Illinois 58,300
6 New York 48,400
7 Georgia 17,000
8 New Jersey 14,000
9 Michigan 9,000
10 Rhode Island 6,100
11 Arizona 4,500
12 Massachusetts 3,400
13 Pennsylvania 3,000
14 Minnesota 2,500
15 Florida 2,400
16 Arkansas 2,000
17 Ohio 400
18 District of Columbia 100
19 Alabama 0
20 Alaska 0
21 Colorado 0
22 Connecticut 0
23 Delaware 0
24 Hawaii 0
25 Idaho 0
26 Indiana 0
27 Iowa 0
28 Kansas 0
29 Kentucky 0
30 Louisiana 0
31 Maine 0
32 Maryland 0
33 Mississippi 0
34 Missouri 0
35 Montana 0
36 Nebraska 0
37 Nevada 0
38 New Hampshire 0
39 New Mexico 0
40 North Carolina 0
41 North Dakota 0
42 Oklahoma 0
43 South Carolina 0
44 South Dakota 0
45 Tennessee 0
46 Utah 0
47 Vermont 0
48 Virginia 0
49 West Virginia 0
50 Wisconsin 0
51 Wyoming 0

Note: Totals reflect WARN notices collected in our database and may not capture all events. Large states like California and New York typically rank highest due to population size, not necessarily higher layoff rates per capita. The WARN Act threshold is 50+ workers for covered employers.

Source: WARN Act notices filed with state workforce agencies and aggregated from state-published WARN databases WARN Act notices filed with state workforce agencies and aggregated from state-published WARN databases