Montana's layoff numbers for 2026 are small enough to fit in a single paragraph — and that is exactly why they need a careful read. Layoff Atlas records 4 Montana WARN notices dated in 2026, covering 173 reported workers. The state's full imported archive holds 45 non-cancelled notices reporting 3,796 workers affected, which makes Montana one of the smallest state records in the atlas. Small, however, does not automatically mean quiet, and it does not mean incomplete either.
What Montana's archive contains
Montana's 45 notices come almost entirely from one clean source: 44 are direct government records from the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, and just 1 is an attributed secondary report. Only 4 notices in the whole archive have unavailable worker counts. On the atlas's data-sources page, Montana's source is rated HEALTHY — its official feed parsed successfully at its most recent check on October 11, 2026 — and its imported coverage runs from January 29, 2015 to July 21, 2026.
In the last 365 days, the archive contains 5 eligible official filings reporting 210 affected workers, with no unavailable counts among them. The newest official notice is dated July 21, 2026. That recency matters: Montana's low 2026 total is not obviously the product of a stale feed, though a two-and-a-half-month gap since the last notice is worth noting.
The year-by-year history shows how 2026 compares:
- 2026 (so far): 4 notices · 173 reported workers
- 2025: 8 notices · 714 reported workers
- 2024: 6 notices · 1,110 reported workers
- 2023: 4 notices · 159 reported workers
- 2020: 12 notices · 714 reported workers
- 2015: 4 notices · 546 reported workers
Two patterns stand out. First, Montana's notice counts are always in single digits or low double digits — this is a small-state filing record, not a collapsed one. Second, the worker totals swing far more than the notice counts, because a single large filing dominates a small archive. The 700-worker Sibanye-Stillwater filing of September 2024, covering the Stillwater and Sweet Grass area, accounts for nearly two-thirds of 2024's entire worker total on its own.
Every figure here needs the same caveat: WARN filings are reported plans, not confirmed job losses. A notice records what an employer told the state it intends to do, and plans can be amended, reduced, delayed, or withdrawn after filing.
Montana's 2026 filings, one by one
Three of Montana's four 2026 notices visible in the archive name the same employer: Wells Fargo, filing in Yellowstone County. The three notices — 77 reported workers on March 30, 16 on June 23, and 2 on July 21 — total 95 of the state's 173 reported workers for the year. A sequence like that, shrinking over time, is a reminder that WARN counts describe filings, not headcounts verified after the fact: repeat notices from one employer can reflect phased actions, amendments, or separate small events, and the filings alone do not say which.
Montana also illustrates a data quirk worth knowing. Most notices in its archive carry a notice date but show the effective date as unavailable, and the state currently has 0 notices with future effective dates. Montana therefore barely registers on the national forward calendar — not because nothing is scheduled, but because its published records do not carry the dates the calendar is built from. Absence from the calendar is a property of the data, not proof about the future.
How Montana compares nationally
Nationally, Layoff Atlas currently tracks 735 notices covering 67,546 reported workers in its 90-day window, with 31 notices carrying unavailable worker counts. The top states are Washington (16,776 reported workers), California (15,853), Illinois (4,772), Texas (3,842), and Ohio (3,224). Montana's full-year 173 workers are a rounding error next to those 90-day totals — Washington's window alone is nearly a hundred times larger.
The national calendar ahead is heavy in a way Montana's is not: 2,412 reported workers for the week of October 12, 2,568 for October 19, 5,754 for October 26, 5,061 for November 2, 6,517 for November 9, and 6,008 for November 16. Those national figures, like Montana's, are reported plans, not confirmed job losses, and they are concentrated in a few large-filing states rather than spread across the country.
It is also worth remembering what never appears in any state's numbers. Layoffs below the federal WARN thresholds — generally 50 workers in a plant closing, or 50 to 499 workers making up at least a third of a site's workforce in a mass layoff — generate no notice at all. In a largely rural state with many small employers, that blind spot is proportionally bigger than in states dominated by large sites.
What Montana workers should take from a filing
If your employer files a WARN notice, the notice date marks the start of your window. Federal WARN generally requires covered employers to give 60 days' notice before a qualifying closing or mass layoff, and that window is the time to confirm unemployment insurance eligibility through the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, review health-coverage continuation options, and begin a job search while still employed. If no filing names your employer, that is reassuring but not a guarantee — not every layoff triggers WARN, and not every reported plan ends the way the filing describes.
The bottom line
Montana's 2026 WARN picture is 4 notices and 173 reported workers, down from 714 workers in 2025 and 1,110 in 2024, drawn from a small but healthy and almost entirely official 45-notice archive. Read the numbers as reported plans, not confirmed job losses — and read the small totals the careful way: as a genuinely light year of large announced layoffs so far, in a state where the data's blind spots are larger than most.
Data source: Layoff Atlas
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