WARN Feed · layoffs by industry

US biotech and pharma layoffs — the actual WARN Act filings, rebuilt every day

831 biotech and pharma layoff and closing notices filed with state labour agencies under the WARN Act, from 1992 to 2026, covering 79,158 reported workers at 270 employers in 36 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: pharmaceutical and biopharma companies, biotech and therapeutics startups, genomics and biologics firms, vaccine and diagnostics makers, contract manufacturers and clinical-research organisations, and reference labs.

What counts as biotech or pharma here: the employer name reads as pharmaceutical, pharma, biopharma, biotech, bioscience, biologics, therapeutics, genomics, biomedical, life sciences, vaccine, diagnostics, clinical research or clinical trials, or is one of ~25 named companies (Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Genentech, Gilead, Biogen, Regeneron, Moderna, AbbVie, Bristol-Myers, Novartis, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Takeda, Catalent, Illumina, Thermo Fisher, Charles River, LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics). A reference lab or clinical-research organisation lands here rather than in healthcare, because the pharma rule is evaluated before the healthcare rule — so compare this file against the hospital and healthcare cut before quoting either as a total. A biotech trading under a founder's surname reveals no sector and is not here; it is in the unclassified remainder of the sector dataset. Every row keeps the sector_rule that fired.

Why this file exists

Biotech job cuts are tracked company by company from press releases, which arrive late, cover only funded names and omit the site. The WARN filings behind them — which facility, which town, how many workers, notice date, effective date, closure or layoff — sit on 48 separate state portals and are never assembled as one life-sciences series. This file is that series, with the closure/layoff split the states themselves recorded.

The employers with the most biotech and pharma 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 biotech and pharma notices

Date is the notice date where the agency publishes one, otherwise the layoff date. 190 of the 831 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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