How the data is gathered, checked and scored

Sources

Every night we read the official WARN notice publications of five agencies: the Texas Workforce Commission, Wisconsin DWD, Illinois DCEO, New York DOL and Ohio ODJFS. Texas comes from the Commission's own yearly listing (with the open-source warn-scraper project by Big Local News as a fallback), Ohio from the CSV that ODJFS publishes with its notices, and Wisconsin, Illinois and New York through warn-scraper. The state's raw record is stored with every row, so any figure can be traced back to the state's own file.

What "verified" means

A row is marked verified when all of the following are true of the state's own record:

• the company name, state, notice date and head count are present;
• the source link and the raw state record are stored with the row;
• the notice date parses as a date, is not in the future and is not before 2015;
• the head count is between 1 and 100,000.

A row that fails any test is held back from the digest, the terminal and the feed.

In the last successful pull (Fri 23 Oct), 63 of the 65 filings read from one state were verified and in scope; the rest were held back as incomplete or excluded as out of scope.

What it does not mean

We have not contacted the employer, confirmed the head count, or checked whether the layoff went ahead. We have not matched the name to a parent company, an owner or a lender. "Verified" is a statement about the state record being complete, not about the world being as the record says. States correct their listings; when they do, our next pull picks up the correction.

Nothing is estimated: we do not publish revenue, EBITDA, ownership or contact details. The one derived field is the New York city, which is read out of the state's single site-address field; the full address is kept verbatim.

What is left out on purpose

Public bodies, school districts, universities, hospitals, nursing homes, churches and other health-care providers are excluded because they are rarely acquisition or lending targets: by NAICS 61, 62 or 92 where the state publishes a code (Illinois), otherwise by the employer's name ("hospital", "school district", "city of", "county of" and similar patterns) and by the industry text where there is one. That means a hospital or agency with a plain name can slip through in Texas, New York and Ohio, and a private company with "college" in its name can be excluded. Tell us and we correct the rule.

The score, in full

Six components, fixed points, added up and capped at 100. The same rule is applied to every row, every night, and the breakdown is stored with the row so you can re-add it yourself.

Why the bands are shaped this way

The score ranks filings by how likely a lower-middle-market acquirer or lender is to want to read the record first. A closing plant of 50 to 499 people in manufacturing is the centre of that market, so it scores highest. A cut of 500 or more is usually a large company reorganising, which is why the biggest band scores less than the middle ones. Recency decays so that yesterday's filing outranks last month's identical one.

How to use it

Sort by score to read the list top-down; sort by workers or notice date when you want something else. Open the breakdown on any row to see which components fired. Because three states publish no industry and Illinois publishes no effective date, compare scores within a state, or set a lens, before comparing across states.

What it is not

The score ranks public filings. It is not an estimate of revenue, EBITDA or distress. It uses nothing outside the state record and is not an estimate of ownership or sale likelihood. It will rank a bank branch consolidation below a foundry closure of the same size; that is the rule working as designed, not an opinion about either company.

Which fields each state publishes

A practical consequence: the industry points can only be earned by Wisconsin and Illinois rows, the NAICS point only by Illinois rows, and the effective-date point never by Illinois rows. The highest score a Texas row can reach is 60; a New York or Ohio row tops out at 85; Wisconsin and Illinois rows can reach 100. Every field, and the state column it comes from, is in the field dictionary.

How fresh it is

An employer files a WARN notice with the state. The state posts it on its public listing, on its own schedule. Then we pull all five state publications overnight, verify, score and store every row, and at 6 a.m. Central the digest goes out with everything the pull saw for the first time since the previous digest. So a filing the state posts during the day on Tuesday is in your inbox on Wednesday at 6 a.m. Central. The home page shows the time of the last successful pull.

The part we cannot speed up

The lag you will notice is the state's, not ours. States post anywhere from days to months after the employer's notice date. The notice date on each row is the date the state records for the notice; "first seen" is when we pulled it. Both are in the feed.

What "new" means

New means our pull saw the filing for the first time since the previous successful digest. A filing's identity is its state, company, notice date and site. When a state revises a head count in place, the row is updated and is not announced as new again. When a state posts a second notice for the same company on a later date, that is a new filing and it is announced.

When a state site breaks

State sites change without warning. A state that cannot be read is skipped that night; the others still load, and nothing is ever filled in for the state that failed. If no pull has succeeded for more than 30 hours, the digest's subject line says "overnight update did not complete" and the email says so at the top.

How far back

The terminal and the JSON feed show filings with a notice date in the last 45 days (up to 300 rows). The home page counts the last 30 days. Older filings stay in our database but are not shown; if you need a longer window for a specific name, email us.

Known limits

Texas, New York and Ohio publish no industry or NAICS code, so their rows cannot earn the industry points, and Illinois publishes no layoff date, so Illinois rows cannot earn the effective-date point. Texas publishes no closure or layoff type, and New York publishes a single site address rather than a city, so the New York city shown is read from that address. Company names are reproduced exactly as filed, including subsidiaries and site names. A company that files in two states appears twice, once per state, as the states publish it.

How your feedback is used

Under every digest row and terminal row are two one-click buttons, Pursuing and Passed. Pursuing is recorded with a thank-you. Passed may ask one optional question (too small, too large, wrong geography, wrong sector, not distressed enough, already knew, other) that you can skip. Every answer is read by a person at the Monday review, and none of them changes the product by itself.

Your lens

The one thing a vote can change on its own is an offer to you. When the same Passed reason appears three times in 30 days on filings your lens still lets through, your next digest offers one change: raise your minimum head count to the next band (50, 150, 500), lower your maximum to the band below (499, 149, 49), or drop the state or sector you passed on most. You accept or decline it with one click. It changes only your own digest, never the terminal, the feed or anyone else's email; a change that would leave your lens matching nothing is never offered; a suggestion is shown at most once in 7 days and never again once accepted or declined.

The score

No vote changes the score. The Monday review tallies votes by score component (head-count band, sector, state, notice type) and, when a bucket holds 20 votes or more of which 70% are Passed (or 60% Pursuing), records a proposal to lower (or raise) that component's weight by at most five points, inside its published range: head-count band 10 to 35 points, notice type 0 to 25 points, sector 0 to 20 points (the industry component); state: not a score component today (0 points); a state term would be new and capped at 5. A proposal is a note to the founder: approving it records a decision and nothing else, and a change reaches you only when a person makes it in code.

United Kingdom: insolvency and administration notices

These are insolvency and administration notices published in The Gazette, not advance layoff notices: no UK public record carries a head count, because the advance redundancy form (HR1) is filed with the Insolvency Service in confidence. The United Kingdom is in build: nothing from it reaches the digest, the terminal or the feed until its row on /coverage says live, and that row is flipped only by a separate change after the market passes its tests.

Sources

Every night inside the Gazette's crawl window we read The Gazette's corporate-insolvency notices (notice category 24) through its published search feed, then each selected notice's own page: winding-up petitions (notice code 2450, the only public signal before an order is made), winding-up orders (2452), appointments of administrators (2410), appointments of liquidators in a creditors' voluntary liquidation (2443) and the other liquidation appointment codes. Each row keeps the Gazette notice id and its URL, the company's legal name and registered number, the registered office, the court and case number where the notice carries them, the dates the notice states and the appointed practitioners with their IP numbers. Companies House's free public data API adds, where a key is configured, the company status, legal form, accounts category, SIC codes and registered office; without a key the row carries the notice's fields only and its notes say so.

Licenses, quoted: The Gazette's terms say "All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated" and that the license "does not cover the re-use of personal data"; the OGL permits you to "exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially". Companies House: "We impose no rules or requirements on how the information on the public register is used". The attribution printed with every UK row: "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0." Practitioners' contact details stay on the Gazette page; the row links to it.

What "verified" means for a UK row

A UK row is verified only when all of the following were read from the notice itself: the Gazette notice id and the URL that belongs to it; a notice code we publish; the company's name and registered number in the register's form; the Gazette publish date and the date of the legal event the notice records (petition presented, order made, administrators appointed, resolution passed), both parsing as dates and not in the future; the court and case number where the notice kind carries them (petitions, orders, administrations); and the raw record stored with the row. There is no head count to check, because there is none. A row that fails any test is held back. Rows are keyed by the notice id, so an amended notice updates its row and is never announced twice.

The UK score, in full

Six components, fixed points, added up and capped at 100, applied to every row every night and printed on the row. It is a separate rule from the WARN score and the two are never ranked together.

Why the bands are shaped this way

A winding-up petition is the earliest public sign: the company is still trading and the hearing is at least seven business days away, so it scores highest. An administration usually means the business or its assets will be sold, often quickly. An order or a voluntary liquidation is the end of the company as a going concern, so those score lower. Company size comes from the accounts category Companies House publishes, the closest public proxy the UK has to a head count. Recency decays faster than for WARN because the Gazette publishes about 350 of these notices every working day.

What it is not

The score ranks public notices. It is not an estimate of revenue, EBITDA or recovery, and it is not a prediction that a sale will happen. A petition can be dismissed or withdrawn; the row stays as the Gazette published it.

Fair use

The Gazette's Fair Use Policy is enforced in code: an identified User-Agent naming FirstVector Signals, its version and a contact address; reads only between 21:00 and 07:00 UK time (a run outside the window reads nothing and says so); one request every 10 seconds, stricter than the policy's five in ten; robots.txt and its crawl delay honoured, and the per-notice XML, PDF and linked-data views it disallows never requested; retries with backoff; at most 6 feed pages and 400 notice pages a night. The policy also asks high-volume users to make contact; the pilot's volume is below that and the decision is the founder's.

What is not available

No head count: the UK publishes no company-level advance layoff notices (the HR1 form is confidential), so the UK rows score the insolvency event, not a layoff size. Court hearing lists are under a separate license that excludes computational use and are not read. Company voluntary arrangements and restructuring plans without a Gazette notice are not covered.

Coverage today

Five U.S. states are live, one pull a night each; the United Kingdom is in build, the other countries in the table are in build or not covered, Minnesota is not covered, and the other states are in build by wave. This is the same table as /coverage, from one record: a market is listed as live only after it passes its tests, and nothing here claims a date in the future as live.

Counts are read from the database as this page loads. Last successful pull: Fri 23 Oct, 11:33 Central.

Not covered

Every state the table lists as in build or not covered. Minnesota is not covered: its agency publishes notice letters without a head-count field, so no Minnesota row can pass the complete-record rule, and it stays not covered until DEED publishes a table with head counts. There is no federal WARN data, and nothing on layoffs that were not filed with one of the live agencies.

What is next

Wave 1, the week of 27 October 2026: California, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Wave 2, November 2026: Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Virginia, Maryland, Indiana and Tennessee. Wave 3, December 2026 to the first quarter of 2027: every remaining state with a usable public list, states with a usable table first and PDF-only states last; a state with nothing usable is listed as not covered, as Minnesota is. The United Kingdom is in build: insolvency and administration notices from The Gazette, not advance layoff notices; in build. Built with Companies House records as a separate signal with its own published rule, because the UK's advance layoff forms (HR1) are filed with the authorities and not published by company. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard. France is in build: collective-proceedings and insolvency announcements from BODACC, not advance layoff notices; in build, next after the United Kingdom. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard. Singapore is not covered: insolvency notices from the Singapore eGazette with ACRA company records. Not covered until written confirmation that we may reuse the eGazette's notices is in hand, because that permission can be withdrawn. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard. India is in build: corporate insolvency cases from the IBBI public register, built as data: the digest section, the feed and the dataset. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard. Canada (Québec) is in build: québec's layoff notices by employer, with head counts, plus the federal CCAA records list; built as data: the digest section, the feed and the dataset. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard. Ireland is not covered: insolvency notices from the CRO Gazette, a weekly PDF. Not covered until the CRO's bulk-reuse license is clarified in writing; then built as data. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard. Australia is not covered: insolvency notices that ASIC publishes, read from its weekly open dataset. Not covered until that dataset can be read reliably every week. Listed as live only when its records meet the standard.

A state goes live only when it passes our tests against the agency's real export, the complete-record rule and a check of how long the agency takes to post; the dates are kept as planned, and a state that cannot be kept running every night is not added. Two things move a state up its wave: subscribers naming it in a reply (every reply is read and a named state goes into the weekly review), and a regional charter, which pays for the build. When a market is added, every subscriber gets it at no extra charge and the digest announces it.

Recent changes

October 2026

• Ohio added, read directly from the CSV ODJFS publishes; Ohio rows link to the per-filing PDF.
• Texas read from the Texas Workforce Commission's own yearly listing.
• Filing identity made stable (state, company, notice date, site), so a revised head count updates the row instead of appearing as a new filing.
• New York cities read from the state's single address field.
• The nightly pull reports its result to the site; the home page shows the last successful pull and the digest subject line flags a missed update.
• One-click Pursuing / Passed buttons on every digest row and terminal row (Passed may ask one optional question); lens filtering by state, sector and head count, with a one-click lens change offered when the same Passed reason recurs; a 30-day check-in.
• A 14-day trial you can start from this site.