The Typical WARN Filing Is Smaller Than You Think: About 96 Workers Per Notice

Layoff headlines usually name the biggest numbers. A filing covering a thousand workers makes the news; a filing covering eighteen does not. But when you look at the full body of WARN notices together, the picture changes: most individual filings are modest in size, and a small number of very large ones do most of the work in the national totals.

The math

As of October 19, 2026, the current 90-day window holds 721 WARN notices covering 66,487 reported workers. Twenty-eight notices did not report a worker count, which leaves 693 notices with usable figures. Divide 66,487 by 693 and you get roughly 96 workers per notice.

That is the average. What it hides is the spread.

A lopsided distribution

On the same day, the register carries filings as small as 2 workers — a ServiceNow notice in Santa Clara, California — and 18-worker notices from ServiceNow in San Diego and Starbucks in Philadelphia. Then it also carries filings measured in the thousands: Covenant Aviation Security's 1,279-worker filing in San Francisco, Medical Facility Associates' 1,270-worker filing in Washington, DC, Electrolux's 1,245-worker filing in Anderson, South Carolina, and Gebbers Farms' 3,445-worker filing in Washington state.

Averages are pulled upward by outliers. A single 3,445-worker filing contributes as much to the total as roughly 190 average-sized filings. When you read that a state "has 16,855 reported workers affected," as Washington currently does, remember that this is a sum across many notices — some tiny, a few enormous — not 16,855 people losing work in one event.

Two states hold nearly half the total

That concentration shows up geographically too. Washington (16,855 reported workers) and California (15,042) together account for about 48% of all reported workers in the 90-day window. Illinois (4,626), Texas (3,784), and Ohio (3,180) round out the top five. Two states holding nearly half the national figure is the same skew at a different scale: a few places, like a few filings, dominate the totals.

What the average is actually good for

The 96-per-notice figure is useful as a baseline, not a description. It tells you that the typical employer filing a WARN notice is not cutting thousands of jobs at once — it is usually a facility-level event: a plant closure, a distribution center wind-down, a regional office consolidation. The 55-worker Behlen Building Systems filing in Sarasota, Florida, the 67-worker Powered by FTGU filing in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and the 82-worker Builders FirstSource filing in Jacksonville, Florida are closer to the center of gravity of WARN activity than the thousand-worker headlines are.

It also helps you sanity-check new reports. If a news story cites a total of, say, 6,568 workers for the week of November 9, dividing by a typical filing size suggests roughly 60 to 70 individual notices behind that number — dozens of separate employer decisions, not one company collapsing.

The limits of the numbers

Three caveats keep the figure honest. First, these are reported plans, not confirmed job losses. WARN notices are advance warnings filed by employers; some planned cuts shrink, shift, or never happen. Second, 28 notices in the window report no worker count at all, so the true average could differ slightly. Third, WARN coverage is not a census of layoffs — states with thin or missing source coverage contribute fewer notices regardless of what is actually happening on the ground.

The takeaway is not that layoffs are small. It is that the system measuring them is granular: hundreds of separate notices, most of them modest, adding up to 66,487 reported workers across 90 days. The average filing is about 96 workers. The giants just make it look otherwise.

Data source: Layoff Atlas