Layoffs in Vermont.

One caveat before the numbers. Our Vermont archive runs from 2003 to 2026 but is missing the year 2023, which our source feed never supplied. Counts and comparisons here describe the years we actually hold, so treat any multi-year pattern with that hole in mind.

Where Vermont layoffs have been concentrated

The two largest events in our Vermont archive are the ones that reshaped the state's industrial employment. A semiconductor operation filed for 500 jobs as its plant changed hands, and the Vermont Yankee nuclear station filed for 250 as it wound toward closure. Both landed in the same year, and Vermont has not had a manufacturing employer of that scale since.

What replaced them in the log is smaller and more varied. A social services agency filed for 271, a regional bank for 254 against Montpelier, a furniture maker for 238 during the last recession. These are the filings of an economy built from mid-sized employers, which is precisely the population a fifty-person threshold is designed to catch and a hundred-person one is not.

Recent years run in the single digits to low teens annually. In a state this size that is not a quiet labor market so much as a small one, and a single notice can represent a meaningful share of a county's employment.

On reading the rail, Vermont records most notices against a statewide workforce identifier rather than a town, so the location column is frequently uninformative. Our record also holds nothing for 2023.

Vermont requires 45 days notice, and pays you if it is missed

Vermont's Notice of Potential Layoffs Act reaches well below the federal floor. An employer means anyone employing fifty or more full-time employees, or fifty or more part-time employees working at least 1,040 hours each per year, or a combination of the two reaching fifty. The definition counts employees without stating that they must all be in Vermont, which leaves a genuine ambiguity for multi-state employers. The worksite limitation appears in the definition of the covered event rather than in the definition of the employer.

The triggering events are defined broadly. A business closing means the permanent shutdown of a facility, or the permanent cessation of operations at one or more worksites in the state that lays off fifty or more employees over a ninety-day period, or a cessation of work not scheduled to resume within ninety days affecting fifty or more employees. That ninety-day aggregation is the provision that catches a series of smaller rounds.

Notice runs on two clocks. The employer must give forty-five days' notice to the Commissioner of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce and Community Development, and thirty days' notice to the local chief elected official or administrative officer, to the affected employees, and to any bargaining agent. The filing has to state the approximate number and job titles of affected employees and the anticipated date.

The remedy is modest but concrete, and unusually it includes health coverage. Under section 415, an employer in violation is liable to each employee who lost work for one day of severance pay for each day after the first in the forty-five-day notice period, up to a maximum of ten days' severance, and for the continuation of existing medical or dental coverage for up to one month after the employment loss where that is needed to cover a delay in getting alternative coverage caused by the violation. Voluntary unconditional payments the employer made, and premiums it paid to a third party, reduce what it owes.

The exceptions in section 414 will look familiar from the federal act. Strike or lockout, a faltering company actively seeking capital that reasonably believed notice would have cost it the funding, business circumstances not reasonably foreseeable when the forty-five days would have started, and a disaster beyond the employer's control.

Federal WARN applies alongside for employers of a hundred or more, on a sixty-day clock, and its remedy reaches pay and benefits across every missing day to a ceiling of sixty. A Vermont employer above that size must satisfy both statutes, and the federal claim is the one carrying the larger sum.

What happens after a WARN notice is filed in Vermont

Filings go to the Commissioner of Labor and are published through the department's WARN and Notice of Potential Layoffs page, which is the record behind this page.

Work out which law your employer sits under before deciding what to chase. At fifty to ninety-nine employees only the state act applies, and the ceiling on what you can recover is ten days of severance plus the health coverage continuation. At a hundred or more, the federal claim runs alongside and is worth considerably more.

The medical and dental continuation is the part most likely to be forgotten and the part most likely to matter. If a short notice left you with a gap before new coverage started, that gap is exactly what section 415 addresses, and what continuation coverage otherwise costs is the comparison to have in mind.

File the Vermont claim the week work stops, using our Vermont benefits page, and sit through the rapid response session. In a state this size it tends to be the only route to retraining money rather than one of several.

Use what Vermont owes you

• Work out your employer's employee count on Vermont's definition, which reaches fifty full-time staff, fifty part-timers working at least 1,040 hours a year, or a combination of the two. Note that section 411 counts employees without saying they must all be in Vermont, and the department has sought clarification of that definition, so treat the geography as an open question rather than settling it yourself.
• If your layoff was one of several at the same employer inside ninety days, add them up. Vermont counts fifty or more employment losses across that window as a covered closing.
• If notice was short and you had a gap in health coverage because of it, raise the medical and dental continuation specifically. Up to a month of it is part of the statutory remedy and it is easy to overlook next to the severance days.
• Work out whether your employer clears one hundred employees. If it does, a federal claim runs alongside the state one and carries a much larger remedy than ten days.
• File the Vermont claim through our benefits page as work ends, since nothing in the notice act's remedy substitutes for unemployment.

The biggest layoffs in Vermont's record

Our Vermont archive reaches back to 2003, which is deeper than most states in this collection, and its heaviest years are 2015 with 43 rows and 2012 with 31.

The long view shows a state that lost its two anchor industrial employers within a short span and did not replace them with anything of comparable size. What followed is a log made of healthcare, education, financial services and small manufacturing, none of which produces filings in the hundreds.

That transition is the context for the notice act's fifty-employee threshold. A statute pegged to the federal hundred would leave most Vermont workplaces outside it entirely.

Common questions