California WARN Act: Your Rights If You Were Laid Off

If you were just laid off in California, or the notice you got gave you far less warning than you expected, the California WARN Act is the first law to check. It requires covered employers to give 60 days of advance written notice before a mass layoff. When an employer skips that notice, the law can put up to 60 days of pay and benefits back in your hands.

If you are reading this, something about how your layoff was handled probably did not sit right. Maybe the notice landed a week before your last day. Maybe there was no notice at all. What follows is who the law covers, how much warning you were owed, and what happens when that warning came up short.

What is the California WARN Act?

The California WARN Act, Labor Code sections 1400 to 1408, requires covered employers to give 60 days of advance written notice before a mass layoff, relocation, or termination of operations.

Lawyers shorten it to Cal/WARN, which separates it from the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. Both laws do the same basic job. They force a large employer to warn workers before a major job loss instead of letting the news arrive on a Friday afternoon. You can read the California statute at leginfo.legislature.ca.gov (opens in a new tab) and the federal regulations at 20 C.F.R. Part 639 (opens in a new tab).

The important thing for you is that California wrote its version to be broader than the federal one in almost every direction. It covers smaller employers, more kinds of job loss, and shorter layoffs. It also gives employers far fewer ways out.

Does the California WARN Act apply to your layoff?

Cal/WARN applies to a covered establishment, meaning an industrial or commercial facility that employs, or employed in the prior 12 months, 75 or more people. A mass layoff means 50 or more employees in any 30-day period.

Those two numbers do most of the work, and they are set by Labor Code section 1400.5. Note that the 75-employee count looks back a full year, so an employer that shrank before the layoff can still be covered. To count as a protected employee yourself, you generally need to have worked there for at least six of the 12 months before notice was due.

The duration point catches people out. Under federal law, a layoff only counts if it runs longer than six months. California dropped that requirement, and the courts have enforced the difference. In International Brotherhood of Boilermakers v. NASSCO Holdings (2017) 17 Cal.App.5th 1105, a work stoppage of four to five weeks affecting roughly 90 employees was a mass layoff under Cal/WARN even though federal law would not have touched it.

So a furlough, a temporary shutdown, or a layoff your employer described as short term can still trigger the 60-day notice requirement in California.

California WARN vs. federal WARN

California covers smaller employers, shorter layoffs, and more types of job loss than federal law, and it allows almost no exceptions. Where both apply, the stronger protection is usually the California one.

One line in that table answers a question people search constantly. The 33 percent rule is federal. Under 29 U.S.C. section 2101, a federal mass layoff needs both 33 percent of the workforce and at least 50 employees, unless 500 or more lose their jobs. California has no percentage test at all. Fifty people in 30 days is enough.

That said, if your employer is large enough for both laws, both can apply to the same layoff, and the notice obligations run together rather than replacing each other.

How much notice you should have received

Labor Code section 1401 requires 60 days of advance written notice before a covered mass layoff, relocation, or termination. The notice is not only for you. Three government bodies must receive one too.

Under section 1401, the employer must give written notice to each of the following.

• The affected employees
• The Employment Development Department
• The local workforce development board
• The chief elected official of each city and county where the layoff happens

Those filings are public, which is why you can often find your own employer in the state's published list. We track them at our California layoff tracker, which also shows how many days each employer left between the notice and the last day of work. The EDD posts them on its WARN notice page (opens in a new tab), and the filing shows the notice date, the effective date, the location, and the number of workers affected.

Cal/WARN was also amended effective January 1, 2026. A notice issued today has to tell you more than it used to. It must point you to CalFresh food assistance, give you a way to reach the employer directly, and say whether the company is routing transition help through your regional workforce board.

What the notice itself has to contain

Timing is only half of section 1401. The notice is also required to carry specific content, and SB 617 added most of the following for notices issued on or after January 1, 2026. If you kept your copy, read down this list against it.

• Everything the federal WARN Act requires, which section 1401(b) incorporates wholesale
• Whether the employer is coordinating transition services through your local workforce development board, through a different entity, or not at all
• A functioning email address and telephone number for that board, plus a standard paragraph directing you to an America's Job Center of California
• If the employer said it would coordinate services, those services arranged within 30 days of the notice date
• A description of the CalFresh food assistance program, the CalFresh benefits helpline, and a link to the CalFresh website
• A functioning email address and telephone number for the employer itself

A notice missing one of these is not automatically a violation carrying a remedy, and anyone telling you otherwise is getting ahead of the statute. What it does tell you is that the notice was not what the law describes, which is worth raising alongside the timing question rather than instead of it.

Part-time workers are counted differently, but still get notice

Part-time employees — those averaging under 20 hours a week, or who worked fewer than six of the last twelve months — are left out when you count heads to decide whether a mass layoff happened at all. That is a common source of confusion, because it does not mean they are left out of the notice. Once a covered layoff occurs, notice is owed to every affected employee, part-time included.

How the money is actually calculated

If notice was owed and not given, the remedy is back pay and benefits for each day of the violation. The daily rate is the higher of your average regular rate over your last three years or your final regular rate, a floor written into the statute so an employer cannot cut wages shortly before a closure to shrink what it owes. Tips, overtime and holiday pay you would have earned count toward it, and so does the cost of medical expenses a plan would have covered.

Two ceilings apply. The period is capped at 60 days, and separately at no more than half the number of days you worked for that employer — so someone hired a month before the shutdown recovers substantially less. Where some notice was given, the recovery is the shortfall rather than the full 60: 20 days of notice leaves 40. Courts in the Ninth Circuit, which covers California, measure that award period in work days rather than calendar days. The 60-day notice requirement itself is counted in calendar days; the work-day rule goes to what the award is worth, not to when notice was due.

One feature surprises people, and it is worth knowing before you take a job: what you earn from a new employer during that period does not reduce what a former employer owes under WARN. Certain other payments do. Wages for the period, employer payments to a benefit plan on your behalf, and severance that was genuinely voluntary rather than promised can be credited against the liability. Severance the employer was already obligated to pay cannot.

What if your employer gave less than 60 days?

In California, the only statutory exception to the 60-day notice requirement is a mass layoff, relocation, or termination made necessary by a physical calamity or an act of war. There is no general business-hardship excuse.

This is the single biggest difference between the two laws, and most coverage of the WARN Act glosses over it. Federal law gives employers three escape hatches, including the faltering company and unforeseeable business circumstances exceptions. When California enacted Cal/WARN, the Legislature deliberately declined to copy them, and the Court of Appeal confirmed that choice in NASSCO Holdings.

There is one narrow additional exception, at Labor Code section 1402.5, for an employer actively seeking capital or business. It is narrower than it sounds. A mass layoff is outside it entirely, since it reaches only relocations and shutdowns, and the EDD has to make a finding first.

In practice, that means a short notice period in California is worth a closer look than most people give it. A gap between the notice date and the last day of work is a fact, not a verdict. Whether it amounts to a violation depends on the size of the employer, the number of workers affected, what the employer knew, and whether an exception genuinely applies. Those are exactly the questions a lawyer sorts out.

What you may be owed, and why severance does not count

Under Labor Code section 1402, an employer that fails to give required notice owes each affected employee back pay and the value of lost benefits for the period of the violation, capped at 60 days.

The details of that calculation matter, so here is how section 1402 builds it.

• Back pay at the higher of your average regular rate over the last three years or your final rate of pay
• The value of benefits you would have received, including medical expenses
• Capped at 60 days, or one-half the number of days you worked there, whichever is smaller
• Reduced by wages the employer already paid you for that period and by voluntary payments

Now the part that surprises people. A severance package does not satisfy your employer's WARN obligation. In Braden v. LSI Logic Corp. (N.D. Cal. 2004) 340 F.Supp.2d 1066, the court treated WARN pay as separate from and additional to severance owed under a pre-existing agreement or plan. If you were handed a severance offer, that is not automatically the same thing as the notice pay the statute requires.

You also do not have to sit still to protect a claim. Under Collins v. Gee West Seattle LLC (9th Cir. 2011) 631 F.3d 1001, what you make at a new job during those 60 days does not come off what your old employer owes. Take the interview. Take the job if you get it.

Separately, Labor Code section 1403 adds a separate penalty when the agencies were left out. An employer that skipped the EDD, the workforce board, or local officials can be charged as much as $500 a day. That penalty runs to the agencies rather than to you, but it is part of why these cases get attention.

Can you still collect unemployment?

Yes. Labor Code section 1407 says WARN-related payments are not treated as wages under the Unemployment Insurance Code, so they cannot be used to deny or reduce your unemployment benefits.

In plain terms, recovering back pay from a WARN claim and collecting full unemployment are not mutually exclusive in California. File for unemployment now rather than waiting to see how anything else turns out. The EDD keeps a plain-language WARN FAQ (opens in a new tab) that covers the basics, and our post on unemployment after being fired walks through eligibility in more detail.

What to do next, and the deadline that applies

Save the paperwork, file for unemployment, and get the layoff reviewed before you sign anything. Most WARN claims in California are subject to a three-year deadline, which is longer than many employment deadlines but not unlimited.

A short checklist covers most of what matters in the first two weeks.

• Keep every document, including the notice itself, the envelope or email header showing when it arrived, and your final pay stub
• Write down the date you were told and the date your job actually ended
• Look up your employer in the EDD's published WARN filings and note the dates listed there
• File for unemployment right away, since WARN money does not reduce it
• Do not sign a severance agreement or release until someone has read it

On timing, the federal WARN Act sets no limitations period of its own. The Supreme Court held in North Star Steel Co. v. Thomas (1995) 515 U.S. 29 that courts borrow the most analogous state deadline, which in California is the three-year period for statutory violations under Code of Civil Procedure section 338.

Two cautions before you act. If you signed an arbitration agreement when you were hired, it may cover a WARN claim, as the court found in Gonzalez v. CVS Health Corp. (N.D. Cal. 2025) 781 F.Supp.3d 1006. And WARN cases are often brought as class actions, which is what makes them worth pursuing even when one person's damages are modest. The court certified a class of about 160 laid-off workers in Etzelsberger v. Fisker Automotive (C.D. Cal. 2013) 300 F.R.D. 378.

In our experience, the layoffs worth a second look are the ones where the notice arrived close to the last day, or where a company laid people off in waves that each looked too small to count. Whether that describes yours is a short conversation, not a research project. You can reach our office at 818-585-1267, and a consultation is free. If the bigger problem is why you were selected rather than how much warning you got, our wrongful termination practice covers that ground, and if you are weighing an offer in front of you, the California severance calculator and our post on non-competes and severance agreements are the places to start.

This article is general information about California law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every layoff turns on its own facts, and the law changes.