The US layoff dataset, free.
The complete historical record of US WARN Act layoffs and closures, across 34 states — cleaned, de-duplicated, and resolved so that one company's filings in nine states read as one company. Free to download, free to republish, free to build on. It is public record, and we think it should be public.
Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You can use it for anything, including commercially. You can republish it, chart it, build a product on it, train on it. The one thing we ask is the one thing the licence requires: credit CanaryWhistle and link back. That is the whole deal.
CanaryWhistle, US WARN Act Layoff and Closure Filings, https://canarywhistle.com/data (CC BY 4.0)This file is the archive: layoffs that have already been notified and have already happened. All of it, free, forever. What it does not include is the live window — filings from the last 30 days, and every layoff whose effective date is still ahead of it.
That forward calendar is the whole point of CanaryWhistle. WARN notices land about 60 days before the jobs actually go, so the filings on record right now are a list of layoffs that have not happened yet. Knowing about those in time is worth paying for, and it is what Recruiter Pro and the API are. History is a public good. Early warning is a product. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
What's in it
One row per filing. The employer as the state wrote it, plus the canonical employer we resolve it to, so you can group a national layoff without doing the string-matching yourself. Every row links back to both the official state filing and our page for that company.
Where it comes from, and what it isn't
Every record originates in an official Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act filing — the notice a large US employer must give a state before a mass layoff or closure. We collect those registries, normalise them into one schema, and resolve employers to a single identity. We do not add, estimate or infer any layoff. If it is in here, an employer filed it.
It is not every US layoff. WARN only bites above certain size thresholds, coverage varies by state, and some states publish more than others. Treat it as the layoffs that were legally required to be declared, which is exactly what makes it verifiable. Full provenance, state by state, is on our sources page.
Working on something with this? We would genuinely like to see it — canary@canarywhistle.com. If you need a cut we do not publish (a specific slice, a longer history, or the enriched fields), ask.