What it measures
- Employers that filed a qualifying layoff or closure notice
- Notice date and, where published, the effective date of the layoff or closure
- Workers named in the notice, where the state publishes a count
- City or county, notice type and, in some states, an industry field
What it does not measure
Most misreadings of labor data come from asking a dataset a question it was not built to answer. These are the limits worth holding onto.
- All layoffs. WARN only captures events large enough to trigger notice under federal and state law
- Layoffs in a specific occupation. Notices are filed by employer and location, never by job title
- Jobs actually lost. Notices may be amended, delayed, future-dated or temporary
- A consistent national total, because thresholds, filing rules and publication practices differ by state
Update cadence
Varies by state, from twice weekly to as notices are processed.
Occupation pages name the specific release behind each figure and when it was imported, so you can see how current a number is rather than assuming it is new. More on that on about the data.
How JobMarketHealth uses it
- Shown on state occupation pages as statewide context for the last 90 days, next to the published BLS QCEW figures.
- Worker counts are described as workers named in WARN notices, never as jobs lost.
- There is no single federal notice database treated as a feed here. JobMarketHealth reads each state's own official publication, and states without a reliable official feed are shown as unavailable rather than filled in from aggregators.
- WARN is not an input to the Job Market Health score.
Where it sits
This dataset is displayed as context on occupation pages and is not an input to the score. Read the methodology.
Official source
State labor and workforce agencies publishes State Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices. JobMarketHealth organizes and derives from that public data and is not its publisher.
U.S. Department of Labor WARN program overview
Related guides
- How to compare local job marketsOccupational data goes local through OEWS employment and concentration. Monthly demand data mostly does not, so local comparisons need care about what is being compared.
- How to tell if a job market is healthyHealthy is not the same as large or well paid. It means employers are actively adding people, separations are not spiking, and the occupation has room to keep hiring.
Ready to look at an occupation? Search occupations to see the score, wage context and outlook for a specific job.