Top 10 US Industries by WARN-Notice Volume: 8,799 Notices, 1,411,206 Workers
PlainLayoffs ranks 19 tracked industry sectors by the cumulative count of WARN-notice filings and affected workers. Live SSR query against the industries reference table.
Research period:
Other Services has the largest recorded WARN footprint of any industry
According to WARN Act filings submitted to state workforce agencies, the Other Services industry has 451,443 recorded workers affected across 4,122 filings, the most of any industry. Across all 19 tracked industries, 1,411,206 workers have been affected via 8,799 WARN notices.
Research question
Among 19 tracked industry sectors, which industries account for the largest share of WARN-notice volume and affected-worker totals, and how do per-industry notice and worker counts diverge?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
Top 10 US Industries by WARN-Notice Volume
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | Industry | NAICS | Workers affected | Notices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Other Services | 81 | 451,443 | 4,122 |
| 2 | Manufacturing | 31-33 | 210,039 | 979 |
| 3 | Transportation & Warehousing | 48-49 | 153,971 | 398 |
| 4 | Retail Trade | 44-45 | 134,680 | 543 |
| 5 | Information Technology | 51 | 116,513 | 284 |
| 6 | Accommodation & Food Services | 72 | 89,064 | 669 |
| 7 | Health Care & Social Assistance | 62 | 61,513 | 659 |
| 8 | Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 71 | 49,759 | 54 |
| 9 | Finance & Insurance | 52 | 49,399 | 230 |
| 10 | Professional & Technical Services | 54 | 20,967 | 289 |
Source: U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics, WARN Act filings classified by NAICS industry sector. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics, WARN Act filings classified by NAICS industry sector. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Other Services, with a value of 451,443 on the Workers affected column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value derives from the underlying industries table; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a revision and our ETL pipeline reingests, the ranking and the prose around it update on the next page load.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (451,443) and the 10th-ranked record (20,967) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full industries population, the aggregate query returns the following summary statistics. These anchors situate the top-10 ranking against the underlying population: how many records exist in total, what the sum of the ranking column is across all qualifying rows, and what the mean per-record value looks like. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied by the aggregate query (records with null or zero values on the ranking column are excluded). The aggregate row is computed by the same database engine that renders the ranking above, against the same snapshot.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics, specifically the WARN Act filings classified by NAICS industry sector. PlainLayoffs ingests the source vintage published by the agency, transforms it into a normalized SQLite schema, and serves it from a read-only snapshot. Every render of this page is a fresh SELECT against that snapshot, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and the edge cache lifetime is bounded by the portal middleware so that a reingested dataset propagates within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the transformation steps applied during ETL.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Industry assignment for each notice is inherited from the primary NAICS code of the filing employer; multi-line-of-business employers are classified into a single industry that may not reflect the line of business actually affected by the layoff. The 19-industry rollup uses two-digit NAICS sector grouping or PlainLayoffs editorial categorization where filings lack a clean NAICS, sector groupings can shift across NAICS revisions (the BLS updates NAICS approximately every five years). Notice-count and worker-count rankings can diverge: a sector with many small WARN-eligible filings will rank higher on notices than on workers, while a sector with a few very large notices will rank higher on workers than on notices. Notices in NAICS sectors that are exempt from the federal WARN Act under specific statutory carve-outs may be undercounted relative to the actual layoff activity in those sectors. This page reports figures as recorded; it is not advice on sector economic outlook, industry-specific workforce planning, or any specific employment decision.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 industries by number of distinct WARN-notice filings
Sources
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) - https://www.bls.gov/cew/classifications/industry/qcew-naics.htm
- U.S. Census Bureau, NAICS Manual - https://www.census.gov/naics/
- U.S. Department of Labor, WARN Compliance Assistance - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn