Every state in the US has their own way of cataloging and reporting public layoff notices by employers. Two states - Wyoming and Arkansas don't disclose this data publicly at all.

Unemployment data is a measure of how many people file for unemployment with their local unemployment / careers office. The layoff data in this data set is much smaller (we estimate it's a 10% sample of actual unemployment), but it comes from public notices filed by employers. For example, if Hilton closes down a hotel and has a large layoff as a result, the notice is recorded by the state which the hotel was in.

It's currently not possible (as far as we know) to get this data in one place at a company and regional level for large companies.

Further, unemployment data is only published once a month in aggregate, making it harder to understand what's happening locally or which employers are the largest contributors (even though you can get breakdowns by industry / sector).

The company notices are filed before or immediately when layoffs occur, whereas unemployment data may not be available for up to 8 weeks after the actual unemployment takes place. Some states update their websites every week or even every day with the most recent data, which is a leading indicator of what's going to happen.

Given the challenges in collecting the data from all the different state sources, we decided to compile it for you to help you ask and answer questions based on it.

The alpha version of this dataset was created by the Vinayak Ranade and the team behind Drafted and Layoffs.tech, by aggregating data across various state department websites.