Top 10 US States by Total WARN-Notice Workers Affected: 1,411,206 Workers, 8,799 Notices
PlainLayoffs ranks all 51 US states and territories by the cumulative count of workers named in WARN Act layoff filings. Live SSR query against the states reference table.
Research period:
Texas has the most workers affected by recorded WARN Act layoffs
According to WARN Act filings submitted to state workforce agencies, Texas has 277,413 recorded workers affected across 2,358 filings, the most of any state. Across all 51 states with recorded filings, 1,411,206 workers have been affected via 8,799 WARN notices.
Research question
Among 51 US states and territories, which states carry the highest cumulative WARN-notice worker-impact total, and how does that total compare to the most recent year of notice activity per state?
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 States by Total WARN-Notice Workers Affected
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.
| # | State | Workers affected | Notices | WARN threshold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 277,413 | 2,358 | 50 |
| 2 | Washington | 236,227 | 1,056 | 100 |
| 3 | California | 197,418 | 1,136 | 75 |
| 4 | Indiana | 149,707 | 994 | 50 |
| 5 | Virginia | 123,716 | 1,018 | 100 |
| 6 | Oregon | 63,395 | 365 | 50 |
| 7 | Maryland | 60,723 | 614 | 50 |
| 8 | Illinois | 58,300 | 5 | 75 |
| 9 | Wisconsin | 56,801 | 535 | 50 |
| 10 | New York | 48,400 | 18 | 50 |
Source: U.S. Department of Labor and state Departments of Labor, Federal and state WARN Act filings. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. U.S. Department of Labor and state Departments of Labor, Federal and state WARN Act filings. 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 Texas, with a value of 277,413 on the Workers affected column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value derives from the underlying states table; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the U.S. Department of Labor and state Departments of Labor 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 (277,413) and the 10th-ranked record (48,400) 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 states 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 state Departments of Labor, specifically the Federal and state WARN Act filings. 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
State worker-impact totals aggregate WARN-notice filings collected from state Department of Labor portals; not all states publish notices to a consistent schema or with comparable historical depth. States with Mini-WARN laws (California, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and others) require notices at lower employer-size thresholds than the federal floor of 100 employees and 50 affected workers, those states therefore record proportionally more notices for the same underlying layoff activity. The warn_threshold column shows the state-specific notice threshold where one is encoded; states without a custom threshold default to the federal floor. Aggregate worker counts reflect projected impact at notice time; actual separations can differ. State-level rollups treat each notice as one event regardless of corporate parent, large multi-state employers file separate notices per state, and the aggregate state totals correctly capture each filing once. Latest_notice_date reflects the most recent notice ingested per state, which is a function of state publication cadence and the PlainLayoffs scrape window. This page reports figures as recorded; it is not advice on state-level employment trends, regional economic forecasting, or any specific workforce-policy decision.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 states by number of WARN-notice filings
Sources
- U.S. Department of Labor, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mass Layoff Statistics Program (Historical) - https://www.bls.gov/mls/
- State Departments of Labor, WARN Notice Public Filings - https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/unemployment-insurance