Layoffs in Virginia.

Where Virginia layoffs have been concentrated

The largest recent entries come from three different Virginias. A staffing company noticed 776 jobs statewide, Amazon 691 across Fairfax, Franconia and the northern warehouse belt, and Yokohama Tire 533 at its Salem plant, one filing each from the contract economy, the logistics economy and what remains of manufacturing.

The federal shadow is present but quieter than Maryland's. GDIT noticed 174 in the Washington orbit and M1 Support Services 168, contractor reductions that in Virginia tend to be single events rather than the rolling series that fills Maryland's log.

The genuinely distinctive feature is what the repeat-filer list does not contain. Across three years exactly one Virginia employer clears three separate notices, remarkable at this size, and it says the state's layoffs are mostly discrete decisions rather than sustained contractions.

The companies that keep filing in Virginia

Virginia is the rare large state where almost nobody files repeatedly. The full list of employers reaching three notices in three years.

• Wellmore Energy Company LLC · 3 notices since 2023

One name is the entire list, and its eight rows across three notices are a coal operation filing site by site. The absence of everyone else is the real signal here. Where California's log is thick with employers trimming quarter after quarter, Virginia's is a sequence of separate events, which means the tracker is more useful for answering what happened at one employer than for spotting a pattern across many.

Virginia adds nothing to the federal notice floor

No mini-WARN act exists in Virginia. The state sits outside the thirteen that passed one, so a Virginia worker's only entitlement runs through the federal act, 100 employees before coverage begins, 60 days once it does, and federal site tests settling the rest.

For a state whose economy leans on federal contracts, that gap has a specific consequence. Contract-driven separations are frequently spread across sites and staggered in time, which is exactly the pattern most likely to fall under the federal thresholds. A contractor releasing forty people here and thirty there, month after month, can shed hundreds without a single notice being owed.

The Virginia Employment Commission posts each notice filed with it, the feed this page reads, and operates rapid response and workforce services around covered events.

What happens after a WARN notice is filed in Virginia

Filed notices reach the Virginia Employment Commission and set the regional workforce boards moving, most visibly around plant-scale events like the Salem tire closure where a whole community's employment is in play.

Northern Virginia workers should treat the federal-contract questions as their first priority, whether the work is recompeting, whether the incumbent staff transfer, and what happens to a security clearance after separation. Those answers frequently matter more than the severance terms, because they determine how fast the next job arrives.

Open a claim on our Virginia benefits page straight away, whatever else is unresolved. Should your employer have cleared the federal size tests while shortening the warning, that shortfall carries the same back-pay exposure it would in any state, and an attorney can price it.

Use what Virginia owes you

• Contractor employees, ask whether the work is recompeting and whether the winning bidder takes incumbent staff before you accept that the job is simply gone.
• Confirm your security clearance status and how long it stays reinstatable in writing, it is the most portable thing you own in this market.
• Open a claim on our Virginia unemployment page in the first days, then find out how any severance you receive affects when payments actually start.
• Plant workers in smaller cities, a single large closure can saturate the local market, so weigh commute radius and retraining options early rather than after several months of local applications.
• If a covered employer gave you short notice, run the federal thresholds with an employment lawyer, staggered contract reductions sometimes cross the aggregation lines even when each individual round looks small.

The biggest layoffs in Virginia's record

Virginia's archive runs back to 2010, and its shape is a long quiet punctuated by 2020's 174 notices. Nothing since has come close, and the years before it, in the sixty-to-ninety range, describe a state that produces layoffs steadily but rarely in waves.

The composition has shifted over that span. Older entries carry more manufacturing and retail, while the recent record leans toward logistics, staffing and contractors, the same drift toward the Washington economy that reshaped the state's employment generally.

Salem's tire plant is the reminder that the older Virginia is still in the data. A single 533-job filing in one small city is a different event from 533 jobs spread across Northern Virginia offices, and the local labor market feels it differently.

Common questions