LayoffLeads

About LayoffLeads & methodology

LayoffLeads is a reference database of company layoffs for recruiters, staffing firms and B2B sales teams. It combines two kinds of public information: state WARN Act notices and sourced news reports. This page explains where each record comes from and how it is processed.

Sources

1. State WARN Act notices

The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires many employers to give 60 days' notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. Notices are filed with state workforce agencies, and most states publish them. We use the consolidated, normalized feed maintained by Big Local News (a Stanford University journalism project). It gathers notices from state websites with its open-source warn-scraper. The feed and the scraper are released under the Apache License 2.0; the notices themselves are public records published by state governments.

Current snapshot: fetched Oct 6, 2026; 5,955 notices dated Jan 1, 2025 to Oct 6, 2026. Of these, 34 amendments, 4 rescinded notices, 12 exact duplicates and 2 rows with unreadable employer names were set aside. The rest are grouped into 4,087 filings.

States with WARN notices in this period: 38. Not covered (no data in the feed for this period): Arkansas, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wyoming.

2. Sourced news reports

News reports come from Daily AI Toll, a sister project that logs layoffs where AI was cited, each with a source URL, excerpt, causality level and confidence score. LayoffLeads uses 133 of its 140 records. 4 were excluded because they were not a single company's workforce reduction (an industry trend story, a lawsuit about an already-listed layoff, a product shutdown and a single dismissal). 3 duplicate reports of the same layoff were merged. Daily AI Toll records do not have a company field, so company and industry were assigned by hand from each headline.

How records are processed

  • Company matching. WARN employer names are cleaned: site codes, street addresses, parenthetical facility names and legal suffixes (Inc., LLC, Corp.) are stripped to build a company key. A short, hand-checked alias list maps legal entities to familiar names (for example "Meta Platforms, Inc." to Meta). Matching is conservative, so the same employer can still appear under two names.
  • Filings. All notices from one company in one state on one notice date are grouped into a single filing. The worker count is the sum of the counts reported in those notices. "N+" means some notices in the group did not report a count.
  • Dates. WARN rows use the notice date; the layoff effective date is shown where reported. News rows use the event date reported by Daily AI Toll.
  • AI attribution. A news report is marked AI-attributed when Daily AI Toll rates AI as a direct cause (the company named AI) or a contributing cause (AI cited among other reasons). Inferred reports are shown but not marked. WARN notices do not state a cause and are never marked.
  • Counts on this site are computed from the data at build time. We do not publish estimates, projections or visitor numbers.
  • No personal data. We publish company-level information only: employer, location, dates, counts and the source.

Update cadence

Rebuilt when new data is ingested. WARN notices are pulled from the Big Local News feed, which refreshes several times a day; the site is redeployed after each ingest (target: at least weekly). Data on the site currently runs through Oct 6, 2026.

Limitations

  • Not every layoff needs a WARN notice. Small employers, small layoffs and layoffs spread across sites often fall below the thresholds.
  • States publish in different formats and with different delays; some publish nothing machine-readable. Errors in state data or in parsing carry through.
  • Counts are as filed and can change when employers amend notices.
  • News coverage favors large, often tech companies, and English-language sources.
  • Industry is only assigned to news reports.

Corrections

Found an error? Email hello@layoffleads.com with the page URL and, if you can, a source. We fix verified errors at the next rebuild.