What is a WARN notice, and what does it tell you about a company?

Information as of 16 October 2026. Everything below comes from the WARN Act, the Department of Labor's regulations and its WARN page, linked below. If anything here is wrong, tell us at contact@oqro.io and we will correct it.

Who has to give notice, and for what?

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act applies to an employer with 100 or more employees, not counting part-time employees, or 100 or more employees who together work at least 4,000 hours a week. Such an employer may not order a plant closing or a mass layoff until 60 days after it has served written notice to each affected employee or their representative, to the state's dislocated worker unit and to the chief elected official of the local government.

A plant closing is the permanent or temporary shutdown of a single site, or of one or more facilities or operating units within it, that causes an employment loss for 50 or more employees during any 30-day period. A mass layoff is a reduction in force that is not a plant closing and that, at a single site, causes an employment loss for at least 500 employees, or for 50 to 499 employees when they make up at least 33 percent of the active workforce there. Part-time employees are excluded from both counts.

The Department of Labor's regulations at 20 CFR Part 639 fill in the details: how a single site of employment is identified, what the notice must contain (whether the action is permanent or temporary, the expected date of the first separation, the job titles affected, and a contact at the company), and how the 90-day aggregation rule works for separate smaller actions that together reach the thresholds.

When can the 60 days be shortened?

The Act names three situations in which the full period may be cut: a faltering company that was actively seeking capital or business that would have avoided or postponed the shutdown; business circumstances that were not reasonably foreseeable at the time notice would have been required; and a natural disaster. Even then, the employer has to give as much notice as is practicable and explain in the notice why the period was shortened. An employer that fails to give the notice is liable to each affected employee for back pay and benefits for each day of the violation, up to 60 days, and to a civil penalty of up to 500 dollars for each day it fails to notify the local government.

Where are the notices published?

The Act gives the Department of Labor no central register. Each state's dislocated worker unit receives the notices and most states publish them on their own sites, in their own formats and with their own fields: some list the number of workers, some the reason, some only the employer and a date. The Department's WARN page links to the state programs. A few states have their own, stricter laws with lower thresholds or longer notice periods, so a notice in one state does not mean the same federal threshold was crossed as in another.

How does OQRO read them?

OQRO reads the state listings it covers and matches the employer name as filed to a listed company and the subsidiaries it knows. The WARN notices page lists the matches newest first with the state, the number of employees as filed and the effective date, with a chart of notices per month, and each company page carries its own notices beside its filings. The notices sit with the other public records OQRO keeps on listed companies. A missing state is not an absence of layoffs, and a notice filed under a subsidiary or site name that OQRO does not know is not matched.

What this does not tell you

A WARN notice is a legal notice of separations at one site. It does not say why the company made the decision, whether the workers are offered other positions, or how large the site was. It is not a count of the company's total layoffs, since actions below the thresholds need no notice and some states publish little. The number of employees is the number the company stated at the time of the notice and is sometimes revised. OQRO shows the record as published; it does not interpret it, and nothing here is investment advice.