Kansas Layoffs 2026: WARN Numbers Explained

Kansas occupies an unusual spot in the national WARN picture. Layoff Atlas holds 791 imported Kansas WARN records covering 93,289 reported workers — a long, dense archive stretching back to the late 1990s. But the 2026 picture so far is quiet: just 7 notices reporting 617 workers. Here is what the data actually shows for Kansas in 2026, and where its limits are.

The 2026 numbers at a glance

Through the latest source check (October 16, 2026), the Kansas archive contains 7 notices and 617 reported workers for 2026. Every one of the seven is an attributed secondary record — Kansas contributes zero direct official government filings to the archive over the last 365 days, a reflection of the state's limited WARN publication rather than an absence of layoffs.

The seven 2026 filings break down as follows:

• First Student — 151 workers, reported May 1, 2026 (the largest Kansas filing of the year)
• First Brands Group, LLC (Hopkins) — 130 workers, reported February 23, 2026 (Emporia)
• Ashley Clinic / Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center — 116 workers, reported March 27, 2026 (Iola)
• First Brands Group, LLC (Hopkins) — 81 workers, reported February 23, 2026 (Edgerton)
• Vornado Air — 72 workers, reported January 30, 2026 (Andover)
• First Brands Group, LLC (Horizon Global) — 64 workers, reported February 27, 2026 (Edgerton)
• Lowe's — 3 workers, reported February 13, 2026

Together they sum to exactly the 617 reported workers on record for 2026. Manufacturing and automotive-parts employers dominate the list — First Brands Group accounts for three of the seven filings and 275 workers combined across its Edgerton and Emporia sites.

How 2026 compares to recent years

The yearly breakdown puts 2026 in context:

• 2026 (so far): 7 notices · 617 reported workers
• 2025: 13 notices · 1,018 reported workers
• 2024: 14 notices · 2,745 reported workers
• 2023: 21 notices · 2,741 reported workers
• 2020: 64 notices · 11,432 reported workers (the pandemic year)

The pattern is a steady decline in both notice count and reported workers since 2023 — though with a caveat that matters enormously (see below). The 2020 spike remains the archive's busiest recent year by a wide margin, more than four times the reported workers of 2023 or 2024.

Reading the Kansas data carefully

Three things about the Kansas figures deserve a clear-eyed read:

1. No official filings. All 791 records in the Kansas archive are attributed secondary records; none are direct government filings. Kansas does not publish WARN notices through an easily connected official portal the way some states do, so the dataset is built from reported coverage instead. These are real notices, but one step removed from the state source.

2. Missing counts. 164 of the 791 Kansas records have unavailable worker counts, meaning the 93,289-worker archive total understates actual reported plans wherever those counts were never published.

3. Attribution quirks. The archive groups records by normalized company name, and some locality fields carry addresses outside Kansas — a few 2026 records list Ohio, North Carolina, or California addresses while appearing as Kansas records. The site's own methodology warns that grouped company names do not establish ownership. Treat individual record details as reported attributions, not verified facts.

4. No future dates. Zero Kansas notices currently carry a future effective date, and effective dates are unavailable on the 2026 records. The dataset describes notices that have been reported, not a calendar of coming layoffs.

The essential caveat

All of these figures are reported plans, not confirmed job losses. WARN notices are advance filings of qualifying mass layoffs and plant closures; companies can and do cancel or scale back announced cuts, and many layoffs never trigger a WARN filing at all. Missing coverage — Arkansas currently has zero records in the same archive — does not mean zero layoffs occurred. The data shows what has been filed and reported, nothing more and nothing less.

For Kansas, the honest read is this: 2026 has been a quiet year in the WARN record, with seven reported filings and 617 affected workers, led by manufacturing layoffs in the Emporia–Edgerton corridor. Whether that quiet is real or an artifact of thin coverage is something the data alone cannot settle.

Data source: Layoff Atlas