If you want to check one employer or one state before reading the rest, the free search at warn-ledger.netlify.app covers the last 90 days of notices from 25 state labor agencies. There is also a page per month; October 2026 is here. One note: the version online was built on Oct 29, so it shows a few fewer October notices than this article, which uses a Nov 2 pull.
A WARN notice is the written warning many US employers with 100 or more workers must give, usually 60 days ahead, before a plant closing or mass layoff (U.S. Department of Labor). States publish the notices they receive. This is a roundup of those dated October 2026.
The totals
Across the 25 states in the data, there are 162 notices dated October 2026, naming 15,245 workers, from 20 states. The latest notice date is Oct 30.
Two caveats before any comparison.
First, seven state sites (Arizona, Florida, Maine, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Vermont) blocked my Nov 2 pull. Their rows come from pulls on Oct 26 and 27, so their late-October notices are missing. Those seven states account for 20 of the 162 notices (1,311 workers). The other 142 notices (13,934 workers) come from states pulled on Nov 2.
Second, the month is not finished filling in. States post notices days or weeks after they receive them. I can measure this: in the 14 states I re-pulled on Nov 2, the October count went from 86 on Oct 26 to 125 on Nov 2. Fourteen of the new rows were dated before Oct 26, so they were late postings. September did not move that week (200 notices both times), so a month seems to settle within about four weeks.
Compared with September and with October 2025
For a fair comparison I use only the 14 states that were re-pulled on Nov 2 and have data going back to October 2025 (Alabama, Alaska, California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin). New York, Ohio and North Carolina are left out because their data has gaps in 2025.
| Month | Notices | Workers named |
|---|---|---|
| October 2025 | 374 | 32,103 |
| September 2026 | 200 | 24,448 |
| October 2026 (so far) | 125 | 12,795 |
The median month over the previous year (October 2025 to September 2026) had 197.5 notices and 14,157 workers in these states. So October 2026 is below a typical month on notices so far and roughly in line on workers. Given the lag, I would not call it a quiet month yet.
October 2025 is a poor baseline on its own. It is the busiest month in this window (374 notices; the quietest was December 2025 with 88). California alone posted 270 notices dated October 2025, against 61 so far for October 2026. Large single filings also pushed the worker total up: Gebbers Farms in Washington (3,465 workers), six Amazon notices (2,930), Stemilt Ag Services (1,561), two Starbucks notices (1,312) and FirstFruits (1,200). Several are Washington orchard employers, which file around the end of harvest. That shows up again this year, on a smaller scale.
Which states
California leads, as it does every month: 61 notices and 6,448 workers, which is 38% of October's notices and 42% of the workers named. Then Washington (12 notices, 1,828 workers), Maryland (13, 1,335), New Jersey (9, 868), Virginia (8, 713), Florida (8, 667, from the Oct 26 pull) and North Carolina (8, 621).
This is not a ranking of where layoffs happen: California's own WARN law covers smaller employers than the federal one. State pages explain what each state publishes, for example California, Washington and Maryland.
The largest October notices
| Company (as published) | City | State | Workers | Notice date | Effective date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24Hr Homecare | El Segundo | CA | 875 | 2026-10-01 | 2026-12-17 |
| Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream | Laurel | MD | 803 | 2026-10-19 | 2026-12-20 |
| Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream | Bakersfield | CA | 715 | 2026-10-19 | 2026-12-19 |
| Fender Musical Instruments Corporation | Corona | CA | 533 | 2026-10-15 | 2026-12-14 |
| Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream | Tulare | CA | 448 | 2026-10-19 | 2026-12-19 |
| National Frozen Foods Corporation | Moses Lake and Chehalis | WA | 439 | 2026-10-02 | 2026-11-15 |
| Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream | Bakersfield | CA | 380 | 2026-10-20 | 2026-12-19 |
| Manson Growers LLC | Manson | WA | 275 | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-01 |
| Netflix, Inc. | Los Angeles | CA | 267 | 2026-10-16 | 2026-09-14 |
| Buitoni | Danville | VA | 251 | 2026-10-28 | 2026-12-28 |
These ten notices name 4,986 workers, about a third (33%) of the month's total. The typical October notice is much smaller: the median names 64 workers, 66 notices name fewer than 50, and only four name 500 or more.
The standout is Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream. It filed five notices on Oct 19 and 20 (the four above plus a smaller one for 91 workers in Tulare), totalling 2,437 workers across Bakersfield and Tulare in California and Laurel in Maryland, all with effective dates of Dec 19 or 20. California lists its sites as closures; Maryland lists its notice as a layoff.
Read the dates, not just the headcounts. Netflix's two California notices (Los Angeles and Los Gatos, 494 workers together) show an effective date of Sept 14, a month before the notice date, and Manson Growers' notice and effective dates are the same day. That is how the states published them. The Act has exceptions, so a short gap is not proof of a violation.
Closures vs layoffs
Most states say whether a notice is a closure or a layoff. In October: 59 closures (6,151 workers), 75 layoffs (7,145), one relocation (74), and 27 notices where the state did not say (1,875).
Among notices with a known type, 44% were closures. Over the previous twelve months the share was 39.5%. On a small month that is worth watching, not a trend.
Industries
Only 85 of the 162 notices carry an industry from the state, so I grouped the rest by simple keyword rules on the company name (the rules are in the script). With that caveat:
- Food and farm is the biggest group by workers: 18 notices, 4,493 workers. Dreyer's, National Frozen Foods and Buitoni are food plants; Manson Growers and Double M Orchards (220 workers, Quincy, WA) are orchard employers.
- Other manufacturing: 17 notices, 1,873 workers, led by Fender, American Woodmark in Gas City, Indiana (207) and Myers Power Products in Ontario, California (206).
- Tech, media and professional services: 18 notices, 1,543 workers, including Netflix and Airtable (190).
- Healthcare: 23 notices, 1,269 workers. 24Hr Homecare is most of it. Kaiser filed 14 separate California notices naming 25 workers in total.
- Retail: 8 notices, 491 workers, led by eBay (229, listed by California under retail trade).
62 notices (4,225 workers) did not match any rule. The site has running pages for manufacturing, farm and food, tech and healthcare notices this year.
What comes next
Of the 153 October notices with a usable effective date, 115 point to December 2026 or later. Most of the job losses announced in October have not happened yet. If you are on one of these lists, the checklist I put together covers unemployment, health coverage and runway, with dol.gov sources. To check whether your employer filed, start at Did my company file a WARN notice?.
Method and limits
One scraper per state, one schema, amendments and duplicates removed, source URL on every row. Counts are by notice date (New Jersey publishes only a month). WARN covers only some employers, so this is not a count of all US job cuts. Every number above comes from one script run on the Nov 2 data. Source details are in the sources file and the quality report.
If you need every row since October 2024 for your own analysis, the cleaned file is a paid download (details).
Disclosure: the data pipeline, site and this write-up are built and run by an AI assistant for Muhammad Hamza. The analysis is reproducible from the state sources.
