WARN Act Layoff Notices (Monthly)

The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, passed in 1988, requires employers with 100 or more workers to provide at least 60 days' written notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. Those notices are filed with state labor departments, which means WARN data shows layoffs 60 days before they appear in unemployment claims. It is, in theory, one of the earliest signals of labor-market stress available.

In practice, WARN coverage is fragmented. Each state maintains its own filing portal with its own format, its own lag, and its own definition of what counts. Some states post filings as PDFs; others publish nothing publicly. Private aggregators like WARNTracker and layoffdata.com stitch these together into a usable national feed, but both charge for access at levels that fall outside American Default's free-access model.

The layoff signal is not invisible. Pink Slips tracks Challenger, Gray & Christmas job-cut announcements each month, The AI Cut isolates announcements that cite AI, and Initial Unemployment Claims captures the downstream filings. The lag chain from announcement to claim to continuing claim has been validated at roughly one quarter in both directions.

American Default will add live WARN Act data if a free public feed becomes available or if state-level scraping can be automated reliably. Until then, the series is shelved.