New York's layoff picture this November is quieter than it looks at first glance. The state has 220 WARN notices covering 13,326 reported workers so far in 2026, according to the Layoff Atlas registry. That is fewer notices than the state recorded in all of 2025, and far fewer affected workers than in 2023 or 2024 — but the averages tell a more interesting story than the totals.

These are reported plans, not confirmed job losses: a WARN notice is an advance filing an employer makes before a qualifying mass layoff or plant closure, and some planned layoffs shrink, are withdrawn, or never happen.

2026 so far: more notices, smaller filings

New York's 2026 filings average about 61 workers per notice (13,326 workers across 220 notices), up from about 54 in 2025 (18,311 across 339) but well below 2024, when the average was about 101 (20,958 across 208). In 2023 the average was higher still, about 128 (23,183 across 181).

The pattern is clear: New York is seeing a steady flow of mid-size filings rather than the very large ones that drove the totals in 2023 and 2024. The state recorded 220 notices in the first ten months of 2026, roughly 22 a month, compared with about 28 a month in 2025. On current pace, 2026 will end with fewer notices and fewer affected workers than 2025.

The long view puts those numbers in perspective. The archive holds 6,590 New York notices covering 549,615 workers. The single biggest year in the archive is 2020, when the pandemic produced 2,212 notices covering 240,148 workers — more than ten times the 2026 notice count. No year since has come close.

The official feed has gone quiet

One detail deserves attention: the newest official New York notice in the registry is dated October 2, 2026. In the last 365 days, the archive contains 219 eligible official filings reporting 13,241 workers — and none of them is newer than early October. The most recent New York rows entering the registry are secondary records, not direct filings from the state labor department. Only 220 of the 6,590 archive records are direct government records; the other 6,370 are attributed secondary records, so the 2026 totals are a good picture of scale, not a precise count from a single official source.

Sixteen filings still to take effect

Sixteen New York notices have future effective dates. Among the filings taking effect in mid-November are the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (207 workers) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (111 workers), the largest New York filings with near-term effective dates in the current data.

Nationally, the calendar is busier. The registry currently shows 705 notices covering 65,089 reported workers in its 90-day window. The heaviest upcoming week is the week of November 15, with 7,887 workers scheduled, followed by the weeks of November 22 (6,614) and November 29 (6,156). The week of December 6 is the lightest on the calendar at 857 workers, before the total jumps back to 5,307 in the week of December 13.

The five heaviest states in the current 90-day window are California (21,514 workers), Washington (17,411), Illinois (3,548), Texas (2,750), and Virginia (2,546). New York does not appear in that top five, which fits its quieter 2026: steady, mid-size filings without the single very large ones that push a state to the top of the ranking.

Why New York filings show up early

New York's numbers also reflect a law that is stricter than the federal WARN Act. Under New York's mini-WARN law, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must give 90 days' notice before a covered layoff or closure, compared with 60 days under the federal law, which applies at 100 employees. The state threshold for a mass layoff is also lower: 25 or more employees if they are at least a third of the workforce, or 250 employees regardless of percentage, versus the federal 50-employee and 500-employee tests.

The practical effect is that New York filings tend to appear in the registry earlier than filings from states that follow only the federal rules. A New York employer planning a layoff for mid-February would have to file by mid-November, while the same layoff in a federal-only state would not need to be filed until mid-December.

How to read New York's numbers

Three cautions apply to everything above. First, these are reported plans, not confirmed job losses. Second, coverage is partial: the registry depends on connected sources, and a quiet official feed — as New York has had since early October — means recent numbers lean on secondary reporting. Missing source coverage is not the same as zero layoffs. Third, 827 New York notices carry no worker count, so the worker totals understate the real scale.

What the data does show is a state having a comparatively calm layoff year. New York's 2026 filings are smaller on average than in 2023 and 2024, the notice count is running below the 2025 pace, and the largest near-term filings are in the low hundreds of workers rather than the thousands. The 2020 spike remains the outlier that defines the archive, and nothing in the current data suggests a return to it.

Data source: Layoff Atlas