WARN Feed · layoffs by industry

US factory and plant closings — the actual WARN Act manufacturing filings, rebuilt every day

4,835 factory and plant layoff and closing notices filed with state labour agencies under the WARN Act, from 1989 to 2026, covering 616,065 reported workers at 2,773 employers in 48 states. Free, CC BY 4.0, rebuilt every morning from the agency portals — no login, no key, no email.

Download every sector-tagged notice (CSV) This industry as its own dataset on Hugging Face

Who is in this cut

Included: factories and industrial plants, auto assembly and parts makers, food and beverage processors and packers, metal, plastics, paper, textile, furniture and electronics producers, and the industrial suppliers that close with them.

What counts as manufacturing here: three rule groups from the sector table are merged — manufacturing (plants, mills, foundries, machining, plastics, electronics), automotive (assembly plants and parts makers) and food_beverage_manufacturing (processors, packers, bakeries, breweries, agriculture). Aerospace, defence and airline work is deliberately NOT here, and neither is pharma/biotech manufacturing or energy, mining and utilities — each has its own key in the sector dataset. Every row keeps the sector_rule that fired, so you can see which of the three groups claimed it and drop any you disagree with.

Why this file exists

A plant closing is the WARN Act's original subject, and it is still the filing that moves a town: one site, one date, a headcount. Yet the notices live on 48 state portals in 48 formats, and the national round-ups that cover them are press summaries, not records. This file assembles every manufacturing, automotive and food-processing notice in the archive as one series, back to the first year each state published, with the closure/layoff split the states recorded.

The employers with the most factory and plant notices on record

Counted per notice, not per event: a company that files in four states files four notices. Employer names are the resolved spelling — the raw agency spelling is kept in the download.

The 15 most recent factory and plant notices

Date is the notice date where the agency publishes one, otherwise the layoff date. 1,507 of the 4,835 notices in this cut are recorded as a closure rather than a layoff.

How the industry is decided: no state WARN portal publishes an industry field, so there is no NAICS column to filter on. The sector here is assigned from the resolved employer name by a published rule table (19 sectors, 3,152 patterns, first match wins), and every row carries the pattern that fired in its sector_rule column so you can audit or re-cut it. The archive holds 61,428 notices; 61,232 of them carry a usable date and are in the sector file (196 have no date in either column), 32,168 come out with a sector, and 29,064 stay unclassified — and are still counted in every total shown anywhere on this site. Manual audit 2026-09-12: 4 of 60 sampled rows were assigned to the wrong sector. Rebuilt 2026-09-24.

How to check any of this

Every number on this page is computed at build time from notices_by_sector.csv (one row per notice, with the sector and the rule that assigned it), and the yearly series from sector_by_year.csv. The free HTTP API serves the whole archive as JSON, NDJSON and per-state CSV with no key. This industry is also published as its own Hugging Face dataset, and the full sector cut as one file. If a number here disagrees with the file, the file is right and it is a bug — tell us and it is fixed the next morning.

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