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Monthly totals of the WARN Act mass-layoff and plant-closure notices filed with each covered US state, and the employees those notices name.
Employers must notify the state at least 60 days before the cuts, so a state's notice count moves ahead of its initial unemployment claims. The per-employer notices behind these totals are served by the per-instrument layoff_notices endpoint.
Available Data Points:
- Period Date: The period the value describes — what the number is about (the valid clock).
- Published At: When the value first became knowable — when the publisher released it (the knowledge clock). Filter on this for anything where look-ahead bias would matter.
- Value: The numeric value, where the series has one.
- Value Text: The textual value, for categorical series such as a trial's status or phase.
- Unit: Unit of the value, e.g.
vehicles,percent,USD. - Value Type:
number,percent,currency,countortext. - Frequency: How often the publisher releases the series.
- Market: The market the reading describes — an ISO-3166 alpha-2 code (
DE), a sub-national one (US-CA), a supranational aggregate (EA,EU) orGLOBAL. - Series Slug: Which series the reading belongs to. Unique within a publisher, not globally.
- Series Name: Human-readable name of the series.
- Source Slug: Publisher/feed identifier, e.g.
kba_registrations. - Source Name: Human-readable name of the publisher or feed.
- Publisher: Who publishes the underlying data.
- Entity Ref: The publisher's own identifier for what the reading is about — a manufacturer name, a securitisation trust, a reactor unit, a country code. Kept so any value can be traced back to the row it was parsed from.
This dataset describes a market, not a company
Every reading here is about a country or a whole market, so there is no ticker in the path and no instrument in the response envelope. That is deliberate: attaching a national print to a listing would be a claim the data does not support. Read it as the context the company-level endpoints are measured against.
Coverage
Washington, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia, each its own entity in entityRef (US-WA and so on). Washington and Virginia are counted by the month a notice was dated, Pennsylvania and New Jersey by the month it was posted. Notices that state no headcount count as notices and add nothing to the employee total. The current month is partial until it ends.
What to look for
Compare a state with its own history rather than with another state: filing thresholds and what each agency posts differ. One very large notice can dominate a month's employee total, so read warn_state_notice_count beside warn_state_employees_affected.
Two dates on every reading, and the difference is the edge
periodDate is what the number is about. publishedAt is when it first became knowable. The gap between them is the whole point of alternative data — and it is also the trap. A Form 10-D describing July is filed in mid-August, so a backtest that treats the period as the knowledge date reads a document six weeks before it existed.
from_date and to_date filter on periodDate, because that is the axis you plot against. Join on publishedAt when you are joining against returns.
Filtering: one market or all of them
Called with no filters, the endpoint returns every series in the dataset, for every market ORTEX covers it in. Each row names its own market, seriesSlug and sourceSlug, so a single request is enough to chart the whole dataset.
Narrow it with any combination of market (one market), series (one measure) and source (one publisher). Filter values that are each valid but select nothing together return 400 invalidSelection rather than a misleading empty result.
How much history there is
Several of these publishers overwrite their own pages and keep no archive. Where that is so, the series begins on the day ORTEX started capturing it and lengthens from there — nobody, including the publisher, can supply the days before that. Everything ORTEX has ever fetched is archived on capture, so the series only ever grows.
Try it out! You can test the API with the trial key TEST. Simply include it in your request headers; either here, or add the header "Ortex-Api-Key": "TEST" to your http request.
Trial key restrictions: Trial keys may be limited to a specific date range and set of regions. Requests outside the allowed regions or entirely outside the allowed date range are rejected; a date window that partially overlaps the allowed range is trimmed to it, reported in meta.restriction.
Get full access! Get a key at app.ortex.com/apis
