Datasets:
pretty_name: Largest US layoff events since 1988 - WARN Act notices clustered by employer
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- en
task_categories:
- tabular-classification
tags:
- layoffs
- largest-layoffs
- biggest-layoffs
- layoff-events
- mass-layoffs
- warn-act
- warn-notices
- entity-resolution
- labor-market
- corporate-events
- public-records
- government-data
- alternative-data
- united-states
- daily-updated
- tabular
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: train
path: data/largest_layoff_events.csv
The 1,000 largest US layoff events on record under the WARN Act, 1988-2026
Rebuilt 2026-09-12. Largest on file: United Airlines, 2020-07-01 to 2020-10-01 — 45,360 workers across 25 notices in 14 state(s). The table's floor is 835 workers; 558 of the 1,000 events span more than one notice and 380 span more than one state.
A state WARN portal lists one row per site per notice. "What was the biggest layoff?" is an employer-level question, and answering it takes three steps no portal performs: 48 agencies' notices normalized into one schema daily, an employer's many spellings resolved to one name (Boeing files under 22 of them, typos included), and its rolling per-site notices clustered into one event. This dataset is the result, top 1,000 by reported workers, rebuilt daily.
Read this before quoting a rank
- Coverage is uneven before ~2020. The archive reaches back to 1988 only for the states
whose portals kept history (Illinois and Oregon among them); most states begin between 2010
and 2023.
states_covered_in_yearsays how many states the archive holds for the event's year — an early-year rank is a rank among the states we hold, not the country. - An event is one employer's notices with no gap longer than 45 days between consecutive notice dates, and no longer than 183 days end to end. A rolling programme is one event; a later round, or the seventh month of a continuous programme, is a separate event.
workers_reportedcan overstate a rolling programme. Exact duplicate rows (same state, location, count, notice date and effective date) are dropped (duplicates_dropped), but successive notices for the same site are summed because a portal does not say whether the second is cumulative.sitesis the conservative companion figure.single_notice=truemeans the whole event is one portal row. It is only as reliable as that row; check it at the source before repeating it.- Employer names are resolved by
alias_merge.py(token signature + purity-guarded prefix absorption); the resolver ships in this repo. It merges spellings, not corporate parents: subsidiaries filing under their own names are their own employers. - The current year is a running total;
event_open=truemarks events that may still grow.
Top 20 right now
| # | employer | period | workers | notices | states |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Airlines | 2020-07-01 to 2020-10-01 | 45,360 | 25 | CA;CO;FL;HI;IL;IN;MN;NJ;NV;NY;OH;PA;VA;WA |
| 2 | OS Restaurant | 2020-03-15 to 2020-05-15 | 38,688 | 128 | CA;FL;IN;KS;MD;MO;NC;NY;OH;PA;SC;TN |
| 3 | Northwest Airlines | 1998-08-11 to 1998-08-11 | 27,500 | 1 | OR |
| 4 | usi services group | 2020-03-01 to 2020-03-01 | 23,695 | 1 | NJ |
| 5 | United Airlines | 2002-12-30 to 2002-12-30 | 18,636 | 2 | IL |
| 6 | Walt Disney Parks and Resorts U.S | 2020-09-30 to 2020-11-18 | 17,780 | 19 | CA;FL |
| 7 | Tend Exchange Subsidiary LLC and Delaware Tender Staffing | 2025-05-20 to 2025-05-20 | 16,132 | 1 | CA |
| 8 | Delaware North | 2020-06-04 to 2020-07-28 | 14,210 | 32 | CA;CO;FL;MD;MI;MO;NY;OH;OK;SC;TN;VA;WI |
| 9 | David's Bridal | 2023-04-14 to 2023-08-11 | 12,964 | 78 | AK;AL;CA;CO;CT;GA;MA;ME;MN;MO;NC;NE;NJ;NM;NV;NY;OH;OR;TN;TX;WA;WI |
| 10 | Yellow | 2023-07-30 to 2023-08-18 | 12,146 | 73 | AL;AZ;CA;CO;DC;FL;ID;IL;IN;KS;ME;MI;MN;NC;ND;NM;NV;NY;OH;TX;VA;WA;WI |
| 11 | HMSHost | 2020-03-20 to 2020-08-18 | 12,080 | 78 | AK;CA;CO;DE;FL;HI;IL;MI;MO;NC;NJ;NV;NY;OH;OR;TN;WA |
| 12 | Ideal US Talent Systems Worker OpCo | 2026-05-04 to 2026-05-29 | 11,973 | 3 | GA;IL;RI |
| 13 | Cinemark | 2020-03-26 to 2020-04-17 | 11,297 | 140 | AZ;CA;CT;ID;IL;IN;KS;MD;MI;MT;NC;NV;NY;OH;PA;SC;TN;TX;UT;VA;WA;WI |
| 14 | Tesla | 2020-05-12 to 2020-05-12 | 11,239 | 2 | CA |
| 15 | Marriott Hotel Services | 2020-03-13 to 2020-06-11 | 10,853 | 32 | CA;CT;FL;NY;PA;TN;VA;WA |
| 16 | Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea | 2015-07-01 to 2015-11-12 | 10,039 | 102 | CT;NJ;PA |
| 17 | American Airlines | 2020-07-15 to 2020-07-29 | 10,013 | 15 | CA;CO;IL;NC;NY;OK;WA |
| 18 | Aramark | 2020-07-31 to 2020-11-18 | 9,977 | 50 | CA;CO;DC;DE;FL;IL;IN;MD;MI;MO;NJ;NV;NY;OH;OK;PA;TX;WA;WI |
| 19 | Hyatt Regency | 2020-03-21 to 2020-07-08 | 9,477 | 49 | CA;CO;DC;FL;HI;IL;MD;MN;NY;OH;OR;TX;VA;WI |
| 20 | Boeing | 2020-06-08 to 2020-10-19 | 8,783 | 12 | CA;WA |
Columns
| column | meaning |
|---|---|
rank |
position by workers_reported (ties: earlier start first) |
employer |
most frequent canonical spelling inside the event |
event_start, event_end, year |
first and last notice date; year is the start year |
workers_reported |
sum of employees_affected over the event's de-duplicated notices |
notices, notices_with_worker_count |
notices in the event; how many carried a count |
sites |
distinct state + location pairs |
states, states_count |
semicolon-separated state codes |
largest_single_notice, largest_notice_state, largest_notice_location |
the biggest single filing inside the event |
notice_types |
distinct raw notice_type strings, as the portals wrote them |
single_notice |
true when the event is a single filing |
event_open |
true when the last notice is within 45 days of the rebuild date |
duplicates_dropped |
exact duplicate portal rows removed before summing |
states_covered_in_year |
states with any notice in the archive for year |
employer_page |
the employer's history page on the site, when one exists |
notice_ids |
semicolon-separated ids joining to the flagship notices CSV |
Where the rows come from
The free, CC BY 4.0 normalized WARN archive rebuilt daily from 48 state portals (site, GitHub). Related cuts of the same archive: employers filing in several states and layoffs per capita by state.
Get told the day an employer on your list files, in any of the 48 states: free 30-day watch (no card) or WARN Watch, $49/year for a list of up to 500 employers.
Automated publisher (APProjects). Not affiliated with any government agency. Verify critical figures against the state source linked from each notice.
Use it, or keep watching it
This dataset is one cut of a single daily rebuild: 61,304 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 2026-09-13; the files above are rebuilt every day, so the live count is the truth.
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.