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 18,870 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 58 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 | 11,068 | 61 | 56 | 31% |
| Texas | 1,298 | 59 | 52 | 54% |
| Maryland | 1,048 | 60 | 61 | 36% |
| Indiana | 855 | 62 | 79 | 26% |
| Florida | 776 | 60 | 53 | 39% |
| New York | 625 | 90 | 71 | 39% |
| Iowa | 413 | 61 | 61 | 31% |
| Colorado | 350 | 60 | 52 | 39% |
| Ohio | 338 | 60 | 56 | 44% |
| Nevada | 337 | 60 | 53 | 47% |
| Oregon | 285 | 63 | 74 | 27% |
| Georgia | 246 | 60 | 58 | 35% |
| Louisiana | 213 | 61 | 58 | 35% |
| Idaho | 158 | 61 | 58 | 25% |
| District of Columbia | 124 | 62 | 67 | 27% |
| Kentucky | 96 | 61 | 68 | 40% |
| Tennessee | 90 | 58 | 62 | 54% |
| Massachusetts | 81 | 60 | 62 | 37% |
| North Carolina | 78 | 65 | 104 | 26% |
| Missouri | 73 | 61 | 64 | 34% |
By industry
| Industry | Filings | Median | Under 60d |
|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 1,695 | 60 | 31% |
| Hospitality | 914 | 60 | 48% |
| Manufacturing | 666 | 61 | 30% |
| Logistics | 631 | 61 | 27% |
| Technology | 512 | 60 | 31% |
| Finance | 475 | 61 | 33% |
| Retail | 426 | 65 | 14% |
| Education | 397 | 61 | 33% |
| Energy | 250 | 62 | 25% |
| Aerospace | 230 | 62 | 37% |
| Media | 220 | 60 | 48% |
| Automotive | 190 | 61 | 41% |
This page shows the headline figures. The full benchmark report breaks notice periods down by headcount band, by every state, by industry and by filing month, and includes the underlying data as CSV.
See the full report · $149 one-off →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.