Planning a reduction? See what everyone else actually did.
The federal WARN Act generally requires 60 days' notice. That is the rule — but it tells you nothing about what is normal in your state, your sector, or at your headcount. This report answers that from 6,318 official filings: the median notice period is 61 days, and 36% of filings show a period under 60.
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What's in it
Computing it needs every state's WARN registry collected, normalised into one schema, employers resolved so a national layoff is one company rather than nine rows, and both dates trustworthy on every record. We maintain that corpus continuously — it is the whole product. Nobody else publishes notice-period benchmarks because nobody else is holding the data in a shape that allows it.
Important — what this is not
This is a data report, not legal advice, and not a compliance opinion. It describes what employers filed; it does not tell you what your obligations are, and a period shorter than 60 days in the data is not evidence that anyone broke the law — WARN carries statutory exceptions. Use it to inform planning conversations with your employment counsel, not to replace them.
Free summary of the headline figures: notice periods overview. Method and per-state provenance: sources.