Largest WARN Act Layoffs by Workers Affected

According to the WARN Act notices filed with state agencies, this ranking of "largest warn act layoffs by workers affected" is computed directly from the underlying PlainEmployers dataset, no editorial cherry-picking, no paid placements. 50 employers currently qualify for this ranking based on our minimum-filing and minimum-record thresholds. At position one, United Airlines leads the list with a workers of 28,572, a figure pulled directly from the most recent federal or state disclosure rather than corporate self-reporting. The underlying source - WARN Act notices filed with state agencies - is a legally mandated filing, which is why we treat it as the authoritative signal rather than survey data or crowd-sourced reviews.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers with 100+ workers to provide 60-day advance notice of mass layoffs and plant closings. This ranking shows employers whose layoff notices have affected the most total workers. Large numbers can result from a single massive layoff event or accumulated smaller events over time. These numbers represent real workers who lost their jobs and had to find new employment. Across the 50 employers on this specific list, the median value for workers is approximately 6,000, so a visitor comparing an individual employer's profile page against this ranking can quickly see whether they're near the top of the list, the middle, or just above the qualifying threshold. That context matters: a rank of 40 on a list of 50 means something very different from a rank of 40 on a list of 2,000, and the ranking page surfaces both the position and the value so readers can judge significance for themselves.

Every row links back to an individual employer profile with the full underlying records, H-1B filing dates and disclosed salaries by job title, OSHA DART rates with total injury counts, WARN Act notices with dates and affected headcount. That drill-down is deliberate: a ranking number in isolation doesn't tell a jobseeker, reporter, or compliance researcher what they need to know, but combined with the per-employer disclosure trail it becomes actionable. PlainEmployers re-runs these rankings on a recurring ETL schedule, so newly filed federal disclosures and state WARN notices update the leaderboard without manual intervention, and retired records fall off as they age beyond the relevance window. Cross-reference this ranking with the industry and metro pages to see whether the pattern is concentrated in specific sectors or geographies.

Rankings compress many records into a single ordered list, which inevitably loses nuance. The position of an employer, industry, or metro here reflects the specific metric being ranked and the data available as of the last refresh, a different metric, time window, or normalization (per-capita versus absolute) can reorder the list substantially. Absolute counts favor large entities; rates favor small ones. A high rank is not an accusation and a low rank is not an endorsement. WARN Act and US Department of Labor records capture only legally required disclosures, so the underlying data is itself incomplete. Employer name normalization is also imperfect: an exact-name duplicate (the same legal name filed under more than one worksite state, or in inconsistent capitalization) is merged into its single highest-value row before a ranking is built, but a genuinely different name variant, a subsidiary, a former legal name, or a related entity filed separately, is not, and can still occupy its own separate rank -- see the methodology page for detail. Read a ranking as one lens among several, and follow the links to the individual records and the methodology before acting on the order shown.