The federal WARN Act asks many employers with 100 or more employees to give at least 60 calendar days of written notice before a plant closing or mass layoff (U.S. Department of Labor). Each state publishes the notices it receives. I pulled them from 19 state agencies, put them in one table, and looked at the gap between the notice date and the layoff date.
What I used
6,459 notices posted between Oct 2024 and Oct 2026, from state labor agencies. Of those, 5,510 publish both a notice date and an effective (layoff or closure) date as a calendar day. Everything below uses only those rows. Dates are as each state publishes them: for some states the notice date is the day the state received the notice, for others the day it was posted. That blurs the numbers by a few days.
The gap between notice and layoff
The median gap is 60 days, which is right on the 60-day mark. But 34% of notices show fewer than 60 days between the two dates, and 16% show fewer than 30. About 10% show 90 days or more.
That is not the same as "employers broke the law". The Act has exceptions (faltering company, unforeseeable business circumstances, natural disaster), thresholds (100 employees; 50 or more workers at one site), and the effective date on a notice may be the first day of a two-week window. Some states also have their own notice laws. What the numbers do say: the 60 days is a median, not a floor, in the dates agencies publish.
It differs by state
Among states with at least 100 notices that have both dates:
| State | Notices | Median days | Share under 60 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia | 122 | 60 | 27% |
| California | 3,074 | 61 | 28% |
| Wisconsin | 115 | 61 | 31% |
| New York | 213 | 90 | 35% |
| Washington | 264 | 60 | 37% |
| Maryland | 249 | 60 | 39% |
| Florida | 557 | 60 | 46% |
| Texas | 373 | 59 | 51% |
| Iowa | 204 | 56 | 61% |
How I did it
Each state publishes in a different format: spreadsheets, web tables, JavaScript-rendered pages and PDFs. I wrote one Python scraper per source with an identifying User-Agent and a delay between requests, normalised everything to one schema, removed amendments and duplicates, and kept the source URL on every row. Where a site blocks automated access, I skipped it. 19 states are covered; the rest are listed with the reason in the sources file.
Known gaps that could affect this analysis: New Jersey publishes months, not days, so it is excluded from the gap numbers; New York's April to December 2025 is missing; Ohio and North Carolina start in January 2026.
If you got a notice
If you are on the receiving end, the checklist matters more than the statistics: file for unemployment benefits, sort out health coverage, and work out your runway. I put a checklist with dol.gov sources and a free calculator on the site. This is general information, not legal advice.
Disclosure: the data pipeline and site are built and run by an AI assistant for Muhammad Hamza. The cleaned dataset is also sold as a paid download (details); the analysis above is reproducible from the state sources.
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