New Jersey's Mini-WARN Act — 90 Days' Notice and Mandatory Severance, Explained

The federal WARN Act gives covered workers 60 days' advance notice of a mass layoff or plant closing. New Jersey gives them 90 days — and a severance check on top. The state's Millville Dallas Airmotive Plant Job Loss Notification Act, usually called the New Jersey WARN Act, is one of the strongest layoff-notice laws in the country.

New Jersey's registry numbers show why the law matters in practice. Layoff Atlas lists 142 New Jersey WARN notices covering 18,011 reported workers so far in 2026, already above the full-year 2025 totals of 90 notices and 13,105 workers. Eight more notices affecting 697 workers are already on the books for 2027. These are reported plans, not confirmed job losses — but every one of them is a filing where the state's 90-day rule and severance requirement apply.

Ninety days, not sixty

The core difference is the clock. Under federal WARN, a covered employer must give 60 days' written notice before a mass layoff or plant closing. Under New Jersey law, the notice period is 90 days — 50 percent more time to look for work, file for unemployment, and sort out health coverage while still employed.

The 90-day rule took effect on January 20, 2020, when amendments to the state act signed the previous year came into force. Before that, New Jersey matched the federal 60-day standard.

Severance is mandatory, not negotiable

The second difference is the one workers feel in their bank accounts. Federal WARN requires notice, not money: an employer that gives proper notice owes no severance under the federal law. New Jersey requires both. A covered employer must pay each affected full-time employee one week of pay for every full year of employment. A worker with ten years of service is owed ten weeks' pay.

The penalty for short notice is built into the same rule. If an employer fails to give the full 90 days' notice, it owes each affected employee an additional four weeks of severance on top of the year-of-service amount. The severance is owed as a matter of law, not as a bargaining chip in a separation agreement.

Who the law covers

The New Jersey act applies to employers with 100 or more full-time employees. A covered event is a mass layoff of 500 or more full-time employees, or 50 or more where they make up at least one-third of the workforce at a single site. It also covers the termination or transfer of operations at a single establishment that causes 50 or more full-time employees to lose their jobs within 30 days.

That single-site framing matters. A company closing one New Jersey facility while keeping others open cannot hide the closure inside its statewide headcount — the test is applied to the establishment where the jobs are disappearing.

What the 2026 filings look like

The recent New Jersey filings in the registry show the law operating across industries. JP Morgan Chase filed a 91-worker notice for Jersey City, effective October 30, 2026. Comcast filed a 119-worker notice effective January 27, 2027. Conduent State and Local Solutions filed a 113-worker notice for Newark, effective January 21, 2027. Mars Information Services filed a 55-worker notice for Newark, effective January 31, 2027.

Those four filings alone account for 378 reported workers, and three of them take effect in January 2027 — a reminder that New Jersey's 2027 calendar is already filling up. The state's 2027 bucket currently holds 8 notices and 697 reported workers before the year has even begun. For comparison, the 2020 pandemic year produced 226 New Jersey notices covering 74,329 workers, the largest annual total in an archive that stretches back to 2004 and totals 2,345 notices and 376,230 workers.

What it means if you get a New Jersey notice

If you receive a layoff notice from a New Jersey employer, the first thing to check is the date. Count 90 days back from the effective date: that is when your notice should have arrived. If it came late, the additional four weeks of severance may apply.

Second, count your years of service. Your statutory severance is one week of pay per full year, and it is separate from any extra severance your employer offers in a separation agreement, from unemployment benefits, and from any accrued vacation payout owed under state wage law.

Third, keep the notice itself. It is the document that starts the 90-day clock and the record of what your employer told the state. If the notice never arrived, or the effective date moved without a new notice, that is worth raising with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, which enforces the state act. Workers can also bring a private claim for unpaid severance. This article is general information, not legal advice.

Reading New Jersey's numbers

New Jersey's totals look large partly because the state reports thoroughly: its 2026 count of 142 notices is already the highest annual notice count since the 226 filings of the pandemic year. But coverage is never complete. Eighteen New Jersey notices in the registry have no worker count attached, so the 18,011 figure for 2026 is a floor, not a ceiling. And a WARN filing is a reported plan, not a confirmed job loss — some planned layoffs shrink, some are postponed, and a few never happen.

Data source: Layoff Atlas