Nike, Apple and Republic National Distributing Company, a major alcohol distributor in the United States, are among the latest companies listed on USA TODAY’s layoff tracker, which is powered by Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act filings.
The tracker captured Nike’s latest layoff filing in St. Charles, Missouri, on April 23, showing 172 job cuts, part of its broader plan to lay off 1,400 workers. On the same day, Apple’s notice appeared in the tracker detailing that a store closure in Maryland will affect 78 workers.
Republic National Distributing Company filed layoff notices from multiple locations, including Texas, South Carolina, and Virginia, totaling more than 3,000 job cuts.
Four months into 2026, corporate America has made nearly 1,600 layoff announcements affecting more than 128,000 workers, according to USA TODAY’s tracker. That is 5% fewer notices this year compared to the same period last year. A large wave of mass layoff announcements from companies, including Amazon and UPS, made January a hard month for workers across the country.
Since then, WARN filings show a cooling trend as affected workers declined month by month, indicating a labor market stuck in a holding pattern amid economic uncertainty driven by the Iran War and mounting concerns over AI displacing workers.
“We just have this stagnant labor market from a macro perspective, where companies aren’t hiring many people, but they’re also not choosing to lay off a lot of folks,” Laura Ullrich, director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told USA TODAY.
In an April 21 report on AI and geopolitics, J.P. Morgan Chief U.S. Economist Michael Feroli described a market showing “resilience in the face of headwinds,” but one where month-over-month swings are growing more erratic than in prior economic expansions.
“The current labor market is neither overheating nor collapsing, but is increasingly sensitive to shocks,” said Feroli.
WARN notices work as an indicator to estimate the job losses from major companies and the pace of those a few months ahead of actual departures, since cuts announced today won’t land until up to two months after the announcement.
While these notices indicate the number of job losses, they don’t provide any information on the other side of the ledger, which is how many people were hired. The net job gains or losses in April will be provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its jobs report on May 8.
The agency’s reports through March showed choppiness month over month, with a loss of 133,000 jobs in February between gains in January and March.
Warning Signs
Nowadays, the layoff cycles are much shorter than before, said Bryan Creely, who founded A Life After Layoff, a career coaching company. Creely said before, a worker might expect a possible displacement once every decade, but now “it’s really every 18 months to two years.”
Creely said he is actively coaching about 25 people and has about 200 clients in a typical year.
While one-third of his clients seek help after being laid off, about another one-third are still employed but sense the layoff is coming.
“They’re starting to notice those indicators, those warning signs, like, ‘Suddenly my boss’s tone has changed in my meetings, and they’re saying some weird things in our town halls,’” said Creely.
For many workers, finding a fresh start has been hard. People who lost jobs recently have previously told USA TODAY how competitive the current job market is and expressed worry about whether their roles would still exist in the near future.
Nearly a quarter of U.S. households live paycheck to paycheck, according to a Bank of America report. A layoff might quickly turn into a financial crisis for some families.
The best advice from Creely for today’s workers is to be prepared and keep an updated resume. “In this market, we have to be more proactive and not wait for the other shoe to drop.”
Why WARN Notices Matter
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, passed in 1988, requires that employers with 100 or more full-time workers provide at least 60 days’ written notice ahead of plant closures and mass layoffs. The mandatory advance notice helps workers with career transitions, where they can start a job search while still technically employed.
USA TODAY tracks WARN notices daily from 43 state labor departments and the District of Columbia. The tracker shows the latest mass layoff notices companies in the United States reported to state governments, with the earliest filings dating to the 1990s. Readers can research notices by state, company and notice year to see where, when and why layoffs are happening. California leads the nation in WARN layoffs, followed by Washington and Texas, which likely reflects their large worker populations or the volatile nature of key industries.
Though state requirements vary and the Act doesn’t cover small- or medium-sized companies, experts see the WARN filing as a near real-time economic indicator for the job market, while some other government statistics can lag by weeks or even months. Other federal job-related data rarely provides the level of granularity that WARN notices do, as filings include details such as employer name, number of impacted workers, location, layoff announcement date, and layoff effective date.
The data, however, comes with caveats: seasonal patterns and any single large layoff announcement can distort month-to-month readings. January’s spike in job cuts, for example, reflected concentrated layoffs at a handful of major companies.
“Layoffs in general have seasonality,” said Sara Malik, assistant professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. She added that some companies might push restructuring costs into the new fiscal year, which could then drive the big numbers in January on WARN filings.
