How much WARN notice do employers actually give?
The federal WARN Act generally requires 60 days' written notice before a mass layoff or plant closure. That is the rule. This is the practice: across 6,282 filings where the public record gives both a notice date and an effective date, the median notice period is 61 days and the average is 62 days.
A period shorter than 60 days is not evidence that an employer broke the law. WARN carries statutory exceptions — a faltering company seeking capital, genuinely unforeseeable business circumstances, natural disaster — and shortened notice can be entirely lawful. Some states also publish the date they recorded a notice rather than the date staff were told, amendments can reset dates, and one effective date can head a phased schedule.
What this page shows is the distribution of notice periods as filed in the public record. Useful as a benchmark. Not a finding about any individual employer, and not legal advice.
The distribution
By state
Several states run their own "mini-WARN" laws with longer notice or lower headcount thresholds than the federal Act, which is part of why these differ so much.
| State | Filings | Median | Average | Under 60d |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | 1,418 | 61 | 60 | 28% |
| Texas | 1,259 | 59 | 51 | 55% |
| Maryland | 932 | 60 | 61 | 36% |
| Indiana | 851 | 62 | 79 | 26% |
| Iowa | 382 | 61 | 60 | 32% |
| Ohio | 318 | 60 | 56 | 44% |
| Oregon | 285 | 63 | 74 | 27% |
| Florida | 199 | 60 | 55 | 33% |
| District of Columbia | 82 | 62 | 71 | 21% |
| Colorado | 80 | 60 | 59 | 38% |
| North Carolina | 78 | 65 | 104 | 26% |
| Missouri | 65 | 61 | 64 | 37% |
By industry
| Industry | Filings | Median | Under 60d |
|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 447 | 60 | 40% |
| Logistics | 198 | 61 | 33% |
| Hospitality | 162 | 60 | 50% |
| Education | 151 | 61 | 43% |
| Finance | 120 | 60 | 38% |
| Technology | 117 | 61 | 36% |
| Manufacturing | 112 | 63 | 22% |
| Energy | 92 | 60 | 40% |
| Retail | 82 | 64 | 24% |
| Automotive | 69 | 62 | 30% |
| Aerospace | 61 | 61 | 41% |
Method
Notice period = effective date minus notice date, for every filing in our corpus where a state publishes a genuine notice date (not a fallback) and an effective date after it. Periods over 730 days are excluded as source-data errors. Underlying filings are downloadable from our open dataset; provenance for each state is on the sources page.
Citing this? Credit CanaryWhistle and link to this page. For a custom cut by state, sector or period, email canary@canarywhistle.com.