The week starting October 26 brings another heavy round of scheduled layoffs. According to current WARN data tracked by Layoff Atlas, 5,503 workers are scheduled to see their layoffs take effect this week. These are reported plans, not confirmed job losses — but they are a heavy figure, and they open a six-week stretch in which nearly 35,000 workers are scheduled to be affected.
The national picture right now
The current 90-day window on Layoff Atlas covers 679 notices affecting 65,527 reported workers, with 33 notices carrying no available worker count. That window only counts notices with published notice dates; undated records appear separately as recently imported filings.
Washington and California continue to dominate the national totals. Washington leads with 17,073 reported workers, followed by California with 14,001. Illinois (4,626), Texas (3,652), and Ohio (3,180) round out the top five. Together, those five states account for roughly two-thirds of all reported workers in the window.
It is worth repeating what these totals are and are not. WARN notices are advance notifications of qualifying mass layoffs and plant closures, filed with state labor agencies. They describe reported plans, not confirmed job losses. Coverage and reporting rules vary by state, so a state with a higher total may partly reflect better reporting rather than a worse labor market.
This week in context
At 5,503 workers, the week of October 26 sits in the middle of the upcoming calendar — heavier than the week of November 2 (5,061) but lighter than the peak week of November 9 (6,568). Here is how the next six weeks stack up:
- Week of October 26: 5,503 workers
- Week of November 2: 5,061 workers
- Week of November 9: 6,568 workers
- Week of November 16: 6,145 workers
- Week of November 23: 6,120 workers
- Week of November 30: 5,592 workers
Across those six weeks, 34,989 workers are scheduled to be affected — about 53 percent of the entire 90-day window total. In other words, more than half of all the layoffs currently visible in WARN data are scheduled to land between now and the end of November. That front-loading is the story of the autumn: the pipeline built up through September and October notices is now coming due.
What the recent filings tell us
The newest notices on the registry show the pipeline is still being filled even as older filings take effect. Recent dated filings include a 135-worker Starbucks filing in SeaTac, Washington, noticed October 23 and effective December 31, 2026, and a 169-worker Foster filing in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, noticed October 21 and effective March 5, 2027. A smaller 12-worker Foster filing in Greenville, North Carolina, shares that March 2027 effective date.
Other recent filings point to December as the next pressure point: an 83-worker DSquared Hospitality closure in Bellevue, Washington, effective December 20, 2026, and a 64-worker Andersons closure in Montgomery, Alabama, effective December 2, 2026. The pattern is familiar — notices filed in October with effective dates spread from December into early 2027, which means today's filing activity becomes next quarter's effective weeks.
Why this week matters
For workers, the practical meaning of a week like this one is timing. WARN's standard 60-day notice period is designed to give people time to plan, but the notice period runs from the filing date, not from when a story makes the news. A worker whose layoff takes effect this week will typically have learned about it in late August or September. For anyone reading a notice dated this month, the effective date — December, January, or even March — is the date that matters for planning.
For readers tracking the labor market, the week of October 26 is a useful checkpoint. If the scheduled figures hold, the autumn wave is not a single spike but a sustained six-week run, with the heaviest week still to come on November 9. Watch that week, and watch whether new October notices keep pushing December and January totals higher.
How to read these numbers
Three cautions apply to every figure in this article. First, these are reported plans, not confirmed job losses — some announced layoffs are reduced, delayed, or reversed before the effective date. Second, worker totals exclude notices with unavailable counts, so the true number of affected workers is higher than the headline figure. Third, WARN coverage is not a census of layoffs: smaller layoffs below the federal threshold, and layoffs in states with weaker reporting, often never appear in the data at all.
With those cautions in mind, the signal is clear: the week of October 26 opens the heaviest sustained stretch of scheduled layoffs in the current data, and the calendar stays heavy through the end of November.
Data source: Layoff Atlas.
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