How to survive layoffs and protect your finances
As more Americans lose their jobs, these tips will help you protect your finances, secure health insurance, and find your next job faster.
Hundreds of thousands of American workers will lose their jobs in the coming weeks. That includes employees at companies like Amazon, Meta and Pinterest, which announced more than 16,000 layoffs in January.
How do we know?
Federal law requires employers with 100 or more full-time workers to give the state written notice at least 60 days before laying off workers. Experts like Cleveland Fed economist Curt Lunsford say such filings under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act can signal trouble sooner than other employment indicators.
These are not called warning notices for nothing.
“There are signs that layoffs are coming. The data is relatively up-to-date,” Lunsford said, noting that while warning notices are available within days, other official government statistics can be delayed by “weeks, even months.”
Last year’s mass layoffs in the United States reached their highest level since 2020, when the unprecedented pandemic hit, with a tally of notices showing more than 413,000 workers affected by large-scale layoffs, a USA TODAY analysis of WARN notices filed in 44 states showed.
This jump represents a 20% increase from 2024, when more than 345,000 employees lost their jobs in announced mass layoffs. The number of mass layoff notices also increased from nearly 4,000 in 2024 to more than 5,000 last year.
Admittedly, this is not the total amount of layoffs. Warning notices do not apply to small and medium-sized businesses. U.S. employers announced more than 1.2 million total job cuts in 2025, the highest annual layoff total since 2010, according to outplacement and consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
USA TODAY’s data team collects warning notices daily from most state labor departments and the District of Columbia. Seven states do not provide public access or have incompatible data formats: Arkansas, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The tracker reflects the information reported in the application itself. Because each state sets its own reporting policies, some notification filings can be delayed by weeks after mass layoff announcements, companies may later amend or withdraw their filings, and tracking numbers may fluctuate as data is updated.
Still, the notifications provide a window into what’s going on at big companies.
On October 28, 2025, Amazon cut 14,000 corporate jobs and filed multiple warning notices in multiple states on the same day.
Gordon McCreary, a 28-year-old Amazon software engineer based in Seattle, knew layoffs were coming. In the months leading up to the announcement, the pressure was relentless, with tight deadlines, late nights, and weekend work. He said the day before the layoffs, the entire office was constantly discussing rumors of layoffs.
“I think by the time the layoffs happened, about half of the team was on disability leave or family medical leave,” McCleary recalled. His team was responsible for Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant.
According to a WARN notice filed by Amazon on Oct. 28, a total of 69 employees were affected in McCleary’s office, and the company reported 2,023 total layoffs across Washington.
Jenna Wright, 30, a Chicago-based Amazon employee, never saw it coming. 27 days before her termination, she had just been promoted to senior program manager overseeing Amazon chatbots for customer service and expansion into new countries.
Wright joined Amazon immediately after graduating from college and worked for the company for eight years.
“I felt a little bit cheated,” Wright said. “I’ve dedicated eight and a half years, almost my entire career, to this company since I just graduated from college. I understand from a business perspective. You know, business is business, but I didn’t expect such a quick and shocking decision.”
USA TODAY’s mass layoff database is updated daily and includes more than 51,000 warning notices from 44 states. The oldest were filed in the 1990s. Users can sort layoff notices by state, company, and notice date to see when, where, and why layoffs occurred.
What will happen to job cuts in 2026?
The first two months of 2026 have seen mixed signals in the U.S. job market.
Employers announced more than 108,000 layoffs in January, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. This was a 118% increase from the same month last year and the highest January since 2009, but that number had fallen to about 48,000 in February.
“February’s drop is a nice reprieve from the rise in layoff plans at the beginning of the year,” Andy Challenger, the company’s chief revenue officer, said in a recent report.“Further layoff plans could emerge at the end of the first quarter as companies tighten amid uncertainty and higher costs due to U.S. involvement in the growing Iran war.”
Colleen Blumenfeld, the company’s vice president of communications, told USA TODAY in an email that the company’s numbers are significantly higher than the WARN numbers because it tracks not only government filings, but also internal announcements, conference calls and internal customer data.
But federal data shows the opposite trend.
U.S. employers added about 126,000 jobs in January 2026, more than economists expected, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released this month. But the U.S. economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, according to the latest report.
California leads the way in mass layoffs
California leads the nation in mass layoffs, with more than 16,000 warning notices recorded in its database. That’s nearly triple the number of notifications in second place Illinois, which has nearly 5,000 notifications.
In 2025 alone, California employers filed more than 1,500 mass layoff notices, impacting more than 86,000 workers. This is far higher than other states.
Top 5 states for WARN notice layoffs in 2025:
- California: at least 86,000 workers
- Washington: at least 31,000 workers
- Texas: At least 26,000 workers
- Florida: At least 20,200 workers
- New York: at least 20,000 workers
Will AI lead to layoffs?
The technology sector has been a major source of mass layoffs in recent years, with major companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft filing hundreds of warning notices to restructure and cut costs.
Although WARN’s notice does not list artificial intelligence as a reason for layoffs, Challenger Gray & Christmas tracked more than 7,000 layoffs due to AI in January. Although the company’s CEO suggested that AI is a future threat to jobs, the current job cuts appear to be a corrective to overemployment, the report said.
Some technology workers are expressing concerns about career stability and are rethinking their career paths.
“I don’t know if software engineering will still be around in five years, especially given all the changes that AI is going to make and the way we work,” McCreary said. He hopes to find work that feels “more meaningful” or has a “less toxic work culture,” and is looking for work in nonprofits or local government.
Anneliese Gauger, a workforce policy expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, argues that many companies misunderstand how AI will reshape jobs and are quick to resort to layoffs when adapting is the better strategy.
“AI is changing people’s behavior, but it’s not necessarily eliminating their entire role,” Gauger said. “If we can encourage companies to take that route rather than lay people off, it will be better for society as a whole because we will avoid the huge shock of evacuation and all the negative effects that come with it.”
What are the benefits of WARN notifications?
A WARN notice is intended to serve as a financial and psychological buffer by providing advance notice of termination. Jack Reisner, a WARN Law attorney and St. John’s University law professor, said such measures would allow workers to avoid financial commitments they can’t fulfill, start job searches that often take more than two months, and prevent them from “falling off a financial cliff.”
A USA TODAY analysis of WARN notices that include both filing and layoff dates shows that thousands of notices failed to provide the required 60 days’ notice before mass layoffs.
However, states vary widely in how they enforce WARN reporting requirements, and there is no federal agency to monitor compliance.
Reisner said the dates listed on WARN notices may reflect the date companies filed paperwork with the state, rather than the date employees were actually notified, making it difficult to understand the true extent of WARN violations nationwide.
“There’s still a question mark here…because there’s no federal oversight like there is in all other labor laws,” Reisner said. “It’s cloudy.”
Without early warning, job losses can be devastating.
“Sudden job termination is one of the most traumatic experiences a person can go through, other than divorce or a very painful accident,” Reisner added.
Gouger, a Brookings expert who has studied evacuated workers, said strong early intervention could reduce the damage. “Intervening early and trying to help people will give you the best results,” Gauger said. “Otherwise, layoffs can lead to financial hardship, emotional strain, and family crisis.”
Reisner said it would be unusual today for a large company, such as a Fortune 100 company, to not be compliant with the WARN Act. However, for workers who do not receive proper notice or unpaid wages, litigation may be the only option, and the process can take months or even years.
“Employees are very appreciative and very appreciative when they are notified. Even if they are not notified, someone will file a lawsuit to protect their rights,” Reisner said.
