Wisconsin Layoffs 2026: WARN Numbers Explained

Wisconsin employers have filed 53 WARN notices so far in 2026, reporting 4,204 affected workers, according to Layoff Atlas's imported WARN archive. With the newest official notice dated October 4, 2026, the state's filing pace is running well below the peaks of recent years — but a cluster of December closures is still on the calendar.

The headline numbers

Looking at the last 365 days, Wisconsin's imported archive contains 55 eligible official filings reporting 4,535 affected workers. The full archive — 608 non-cancelled notices — reports 60,205 workers affected across its entire history, drawn from 585 direct government records and 22 attributed secondary reports.

The yearly trend tells the story:

• 2026: 53 notices, 4,204 reported workers (year to date)
• 2025: 62 notices, 4,791 reported workers
• 2024: 94 notices, 6,860 reported workers
• 2023: 75 notices, 6,248 reported workers
• 2022: 43 notices, 3,813 reported workers
• 2021: 30 notices, 2,360 reported workers
• 2020: 251 notices, 31,929 reported workers

Filings have fallen for two straight years from the 2024 high, and 2026 is on track to come in below 2025's total as well. The 2020 spike — 251 notices and nearly 32,000 workers — remains the outlier of the entire archive.

The biggest 2026 filings

Closures dominate Wisconsin's recent WARN history, and the largest 2026 filings so far fit that pattern:

• Parkhurst Dining (Kenosha) — 160 workers, closure effective July 3
• Ryder Integrated Logistics (Green Bay) — 151 workers, closure effective June 30
• Maynard Steel Casting Company and Maynard Alloy Casting (Milwaukee) — 77 workers, closure effective December 4, noticed October 4
• Samuel Pressure Vessel Group (Tomahawk) — 76 workers, closure effective August 4
• Durr CTS (De Pere) — 75 workers, closure effective October 13
• Foremost Farms USA (Marshfield) — 68 workers, closure effective December 15
• PPD (Middleton) — 69 workers, layoff effective September 28 (amended filing)
• School Specialty (Fort Atkinson) — 59 workers, closure effective September 25

Manufacturing accounts for most of the large filings — steel casting, pressure vessels, plastics, and food processing (Foremost Farms, Prairie Farms Dairy's two Shullsburg creameries) all appear in the 2026 record.

What's still ahead

Eight Wisconsin notices carry future effective dates. The most immediate is Durr CTS's 75-worker closure in De Pere, effective October 13 — this week. December brings the two largest remaining events: Maynard Steel Casting's 77-worker Milwaukee closure on December 4 and Foremost Farms USA's 68-worker Marshfield closure on December 15, plus Bank First's 47-worker layoff in Wausau and Sunlite Plastics' 41-worker layoff in Germantown, both effective the first week of December. One filing — UnityPoint Health's 17-worker remote layoff — stretches all the way to February 28, 2027.

Reading the data carefully

A few caveats matter. These are reported plans, not confirmed job losses — WARN notices describe what employers told the state they intend to do, and plans can change, shrink, or be withdrawn. Seven Wisconsin notices in the archive have unavailable worker counts, so the true totals are slightly higher than the reported figures. And the archive totals above cover imported records only; the national 90-day window currently shows 738 notices and 68,093 reported workers across all states, led by Washington (16,776), California (16,011), Illinois (4,772), Texas (3,842), and Ohio (3,224). Wisconsin doesn't crack that top five — its 2026 totals are mid-pack nationally.

Still, the direction is clear: Wisconsin's WARN activity has cooled considerably from its 2024 peak, even as a handful of December manufacturing closures will keep the state's year-end numbers from falling much further.

Data source: Layoff Atlas