About WARN Firehose
Independent US labor market data. Six federal datasets joined into one signal. Daily-updated, machine-readable, free to start.
What we do
WARN Firehose aggregates US labor market data from six federal sources into a single, queryable platform:
- WARN Act mass layoff notices — 85,000+ filings across all 50 state workforce agencies, dating back to 1988
- H-1B / LCA visa petitions — 5.9M+ records from USCIS and the Department of Labor, FY2009 onward
- SEC 8-K filings — material event filings (10,700+ parsed) cross-referenced with WARN filers
- Federal bankruptcy filings — Chapter 7/11/13 cases from PACER, SEC EDGAR, and FJC
- DOL weekly unemployment claims — 42 years of initial and continued claims by state (1984–present)
- BLS JOLTS — Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, monthly by state and industry
Records are scraped daily, normalized, deduplicated, and surfaced via a REST API, an MCP server for AI agents, CSV/JSON/Parquet exports, alerts, and 12,000+ SEO pages for organic discovery.
Why we built this
WARN Act notices are public records, but they are scattered across 50 separate state workforce agency websites, each with different PDF/HTML/Excel formats, naming conventions, and update cadences. Until recently, nobody had quietly and reliably consolidated them. The same is true for the four other federal datasets we cover — each lives in its own portal, schema, and refresh cadence, making cross-dataset analysis prohibitively expensive for most analysts.
We saw three audiences underserved by the status quo:
- H-1B visa holders wanting an early warning when their sponsor employer files a WARN notice or hits SEC distress signals — critical for the 60-day post-termination grace period.
- Hedge funds, short sellers, and credit analysts looking for distress signals before they show up in quarterly filings.
- Journalists, lawyers, and researchers who need authoritative, dated, citable records of mass layoffs — not crowdsourced or paywalled.
WARN Firehose is our answer. It is independent, audit-friendly, and built to outlast trend cycles.
Who we are
WARN Firehose is independently owned and operated. No external investors, no editorial influence from labor agencies, no syndication deals that affect what we publish or how. Every decision — what data to ingest, how to normalize it, what to charge — is documented in the public GitHub repository.
How we work
- Daily ingest at 03:00 UTC. 50 state-specific scrapers + federal pipelines pull new records, normalize them, deduplicate, and enrich with NAICS industry codes, county geocoding, and cross-references to SEC + bankruptcy data.
- Open about our gaps. Arkansas, Wyoming, and New Hampshire do not publish WARN data — we document this on our methodology page rather than fabricate records.
- Audit trail per record. Every WARN notice on the site carries its source state URL and the timestamp it was last scraped. If you can't find the source, treat the record as suspect.
- No accuracy guarantees. We surface public records as filed. If a state agency publishes an error, we mirror that error until they correct it. Read our terms for the full disclaimer.
By the numbers
Contact & press
Press inquiries, data requests, or partnership questions: [email protected]. Replies usually within one business day. Journalists get free API access — details on the Press Room.
Looking for our data sources, scraping cadence, and known gaps? Read our methodology. Looking for press citations and academic references? See Cited By.