States with the Highest Layoff Rate

The layoff and discharge rate measures involuntary separations, workers let go by employers through layoffs, reductions in force, discharges, and terminations. States with high layoff rates may be experiencing industry-specific downturns, seasonal workforce adjustments, or economic restructuring. Unlike quits (voluntary), layoffs reflect employer-side decisions and can signal economic stress in specific sectors or regions.

This ranking is computed from the latest available month of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), state-level series, harmonized against the BLS state employment denominator so the figures stand on the same statistical footing across all 51 jurisdictions. Rates are seasonally adjusted where BLS publishes adjusted series and reported as raw values where they are not, with no proprietary smoothing or extrapolation applied on top of the official numbers.

Methodology: rows are sorted by the metric named in the column header, ties broken by the most recent month value, then by alphabetical state name. Differences smaller than the JOLTS published relative standard error band of roughly ±0.3 percentage points at the state level should be treated as statistically indistinguishable; the ordering is informative for clusters of states, not for one-place gaps. See our methodology page for the full pipeline, and consult the BLS JOLTS state data issues notice for upstream caveats.