California WARN notices are posted by the state's Employment Development Department (EDD), which publishes a current spreadsheet of filings plus yearly PDF reports on its WARN page. If you work in tech in California, you can read that file in a few minutes, and if you want to hear about a specific company without opening it every week, AyeWatch can watch the page and alert you when the name appears.
California's rules in short
California has its own WARN law on top of the federal one, and it reaches further. As the EDD summarizes it, as of November 2026:
- It covers establishments with 75 or more employees, counting full and part-time staff, where the federal law starts at 100 full-time.
- A layoff of 50 or more people within 30 days triggers it, whatever share of the workforce that is. Federal law usually also needs a third of the site.
- A plant closure of any size, a relocation of 100 miles or more, and moving a call center abroad are covered too.
- Notice is due 60 days ahead, to affected employees, the EDD, the local workforce development area and the chief elected official of each city and county affected.
New for 2026, under Senate Bill 617, notices must say whether the employer will coordinate support services with the local workforce board or another organization, with contact details and a short description of those services. The EDD checklist also asks for a description of CalFresh food benefits.
How to read the EDD list
The latest report opens as an XLSX file. Each row is one notice, with these columns worth knowing:
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Notice date | When the employer issued the notice |
| Effective date | When separations begin, often weeks in the future |
| Company | The legal entity, which may not match the brand name |
| County and address | The site, which matters for multi-campus companies |
| No. of employees | Headcount at that site for this notice |
| Layoff or closure | Permanent or temporary, layoff or closure |
A few reading tips. Search for both the legal name and the brand, since a company may file under an entity name that differs from the one on its website. A single round of cuts can show up as several rows, one per site, so add them up before comparing with a news headline. And because notices come before the cuts, an effective date in the future is normal, not a typo.
Past filings sit in the yearly PDFs, which run on the state's fiscal year from July 1 to June 30.
What the list will not show
The list holds only the notices employers file, and the law requires them only above its thresholds, so smaller cuts and smaller companies usually will not be there. A notice can also be revised or withdrawn later. For a public company, check whether the same event appears in its SEC filings or a company statement before you treat a row as the full story.
Getting an alert instead of checking
In AyeWatch, add the EDD WARN page as a webpage monitor and write the condition in plain words, for example "new notices from my employer or these three companies." Add a topic monitor for news about new WARN filings by those names, since local reporters often write them up.
Alerts arrive by push on every plan, with Slack, email and webhooks on paid plans. There is a free preview and plans from $9 a month.
If you only want a monthly look, downloading the spreadsheet yourself costs nothing and is enough. AyeWatch is for when you want to know the week a name shows up, and it does not keep its own database of past filings.