Texas Job Market: 2025 WARN Filings Meet BLS Projections

Texas filed more layoff notices in 2025 than the year before, but those notices covered fewer people. The state's WARN record shows 300 layoff events affecting 24,367 workers across 204 companies, up from 218 events in 2024 but down from 27,165 affected workers. It was a year of many mid-sized cuts spread across the calendar and the map, with no single plant closure dominating it. The federal occupational projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics point somewhere else. The jobs Texas is structurally projected to lose are mostly clerical keyboard and telephone work: data entry keyers, switchboard operators, word processors. Those occupations barely register in a record made of airport cuts, fulfillment-center reductions, and nonprofit program closures. This piece reads the two signals side by side.

The two datasets measure different things, and the comparison only works if that is clear from the start. Layoff figures come from LayoffTracker.us, which compiles records only from state WARN Act filings. They are current as of a September 2026 snapshot that covers 2025 in full. The occupational projections come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via CareerOneStop and O*NET. Texas projections run through 2032, and a separate national growth ranking runs through 2034. A WARN filing is an acute event: a specific employer cutting a specific site on a specific date. A BLS projection is a structural forecast: the expected drift of an occupation's total employment over most of a decade. One counts notices as they are filed, and the other is a long-run trend line. Reading them together is useful precisely because they measure different things.

The acute signal: Texas's 2025 WARN filings

By affected-worker count, Texas ranked third nationally in 2025, behind California (97,751) and Washington (30,707). By number of filings it ranked fourth, behind California, New York, and Florida. Its 24,367 affected workers were about 5.9% of the 410,835 recorded nationwide. That national total should be read as a floor. It reflects only the states that publish WARN data with headcounts; see the Methodology section.

The year-over-year comparison is more revealing than the ranking:

	2024	2025	Change
WARN events	218	300	+38%
Affected workers	27,165	24,367	−10%
Companies filing	161	204	+43
Workers per event	~125	~81	smaller filings
National rank (workers)	2nd	3rd

Nationally, both measures rose in 2025: events by about 18% and affected workers by about 17%. Texas moved against that trend on headcount. It saw more filings, from more companies, but each one was smaller on average. At roughly 81 workers per event, the 2025 Texas average sits almost exactly on the national figure of about 80. In 2024 it was about 125.

The monthly shape changed too. In 2024, May alone carried 7,101 affected workers, about a quarter of the year's total. 2025 had no month like that. Excluding January (574 workers) and June (1,150), every month's headcount fell between 1,980 and 3,011. The peak came in March, with 3,011 workers across 34 events. The busiest month for filings was September, with 37. April was the outlier in the other direction: just nine events, but 2,031 affected workers, or more than 220 per filing. Four of the year's larger notices carry April layoff dates:

• Southwest's Dallas Love Field operation (626)
• Christus Health Santa Rosa Medical Center in San Antonio (479)
• Houston Refining LP, a LyondellBasell operation (345)
• L3Harris Technologies in Rockwall (179)

The largest filings do not cluster in one line of business. The single biggest notice of the year was a Chewy Inc. fulfillment center in Dallas (674 workers). TTEC Government Solutions in Austin (650) and the Southwest Love Field notice (626) came next. They were followed by MedStar Mobile Healthcare in Fort Worth (589) and Chevron in Houston (575). Chevron filed again in Midland (185), for 760 workers across its two Texas notices. Aviation appears repeatedly: Allied Aviation, an aviation fueling provider, in Southlake (362) and Spirit Airlines in Houston (173). So do logistics and distribution: FedEx Supply Chain Logistics & Electronics in Fort Worth (305), HelloFresh's Grand Prairie operation (273), SM Cargo in Houston (194), and Animal Supply Co. in Grand Prairie (145). Energy and industrial services appear as well: Turner Industries in Paris (211) and Wood Group USA in Freeport (180).

One cluster stands out. Nonprofit, social-service, legal-aid, and government-contract service organizations appear throughout the top of the list:

• Southwest Key Programs, which its own description calls one of the largest Latino-led nonprofits in the country, filed four notices in Houston and Channelview totaling 981 workers. That is the largest combined total of any company among the fifty biggest Texas filings. All four share an October 5 layoff date and a July 31 notice date.
• Sunny Glen Children's Home, which describes itself as "a sanctuary for children of the Rio Grande Valley," filed in Raymondville (424).
• Management & Training Corp filed in Henderson (172) and Raymondville (166).
• The American Bar Association filed in Harlingen (191).
• RAICES, a nonprofit providing legal aid to immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, filed in San Antonio (159).
• Catholic Charities, Diocese of Fort Worth filed for 169 workers.
• MVM, a public-safety and national-security services firm, filed in El Paso (247).

The WARN record says nothing about why any of these organizations cut staff. This article does not supply a reason either. The concentration is visible in the filings. Its cause is not.

Where in Texas

Houston led the state, with 4,417 affected workers across 49 events, about 18% of the Texas total. Dallas (2,077), Fort Worth (1,971), Austin (1,769), and San Antonio (1,447) came next. Together, those five cities account for just under half of the state's affected workers. Counting the Dallas–Fort Worth suburbs changes the picture, though. Irving (717), Plano (602), Grand Prairie (564), Lewisville (460), Southlake (387), Lancaster (381), and Haslet (321) all appear in the top twenty. With Dallas and Fort Worth, the named Metroplex cities on that list total about 7,480 workers, or roughly 31% of the state figure. The Houston city label alone totals 4,417. Measured by region rather than by city label, the Metroplex had the heavier year.

Two smaller clusters sit along the border. Rio Grande Valley cities in the top twenty are Raymondville (590), Donna (326), McAllen (288), and Edinburg (264). Edinburg's five events all come from a single company. Further west are El Paso (924) and Laredo (366). As in other states, some small-town totals that look anomalous trace to one or two large employers. Raymondville's 590 workers are exactly the Sunny Glen and Management & Training Corp filings named above.

Treat the city detail as directional, not exact. City names are raw entries from individual WARN filings. The 2025 Texas data spreads across 99 distinct city labels, and spelling variants of the same place can split a city's total. (The 2024 data, for instance, lists both "Fort Worth" and "Ft. Worth.") The broad pattern is reliable: Houston as the largest single city, the Metroplex as the largest region, and secondary clusters on the border. The precise ordering below the top few is not. One date caveat also applies. When a notice does not record a precise layoff date, the dataset uses a year-end placeholder of December 31. The Congo LLC filing in Lewisville (155 workers) is flagged this way, so read it as reported through year-end 2025, not as a literal December 31 event.

The structural signal: what BLS projects Texas to lose

Now set the filings aside and look at where federal projections say Texas's occupational employment is shrinking. A different list appears, dominated by office and clerical work. Every occupation below carries a "Below Average" outlook through 2032:

Rank	Occupation	2032 change	Texas employment
1	Word Processors and Typists	−31%	290 → 200
2	Foundry Mold and Coremakers	−24%	460 → 350
3	Watch and Clock Repairers	−23%	300 → 230
4	Telephone Operators	−20%	100 → 80
5	Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service	−18%	3,860 → 3,180
6	Data Entry Keyers	−17%	19,270 → 16,090
6	Drilling and Boring Machine Tool Setters (Metal and Plastic)	−17%	470 → 390
8	Coil Winders, Tapers, and Finishers	−16%	740 → 620
8	Cutters and Trimmers, Hand	−16%	320 → 270
10	Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons	−14%	140 → 120

The percentages hide how the loss is distributed. Across all ten occupations, the projected net loss is about 4,420 jobs. The four clerical and telephone occupations (word processors, telephone operators, switchboard operators, and data entry keyers) account for about 3,970 of them, or roughly 90%. Data entry keyers alone account for 3,180. BLS describes them as workers who "operate data entry device, such as keyboard or photo composing perforator," and whose duties "may include verifying data and preparing materials for printing." Their Texas median wage is $38,880, below the $41,340 national median. The Texas range runs from $28,020 at the 10th percentile to $56,920 at the 90th, and the typical entry path is a high-school diploma. Switchboard operators are the second-largest loss, about 680 jobs. They are also paid less in Texas than nationally: a $33,620 state median against $38,630.

The production trades on the list (foundry mold making, drilling-machine setting, coil winding, hand cutting) are real declines, but small ones. Each employs only a few hundred people statewide. In Texas, the structural erosion is overwhelmingly a back-office story.

Where the two signals meet, and mostly don't

The collision is largely a divergence, and in Texas it is sharper than usual. The workforces behind the 2025 WARN record and the occupations BLS projects Texas to lose are, for the most part, different workforces.

The loudest filings ran through fulfillment and logistics, aviation, health care, energy, and a cluster of nonprofit and government-contract social services. None of those lines of business is data entry or switchboard work. A few filings sit closer to the clerical and telephone end of the economy. CyraCom International in Houston (327) is a language-services provider whose profile describes translation and interpretation work. Manpower Group in Irving (173) is a staffing firm. TTEC Government Solutions in Austin (650) is, by its name, a government-services operation. This is where the comparison has to stop. WARN filings record no occupational detail at all. They name an employer, a site, a date, and a headcount, not the jobs held by the people affected. A filing at a language-services or staffing firm could include keyboard and phone roles, but the data cannot confirm that. Claiming a tighter overlap would mean inventing a join key the two sources don't share.

The same limit applies on the production side. Several of the fifty largest filings are evidently manufacturing or processing sites:

• Tyson Foods in Fort Worth (275)
• F&S Produce West in Houston (225)
• Flagstone Foods in El Paso (225)
• A Smurfit Westrock packaging operation in Forney (200; recorded in the filing as "Smurfikt Westrock")
• A Trinity Rail tank-car operation in Longview (170)
• Texas Instruments in Dallas (163)

None of them can be tied to foundry, drilling, or coil-winding jobs specifically.

The pattern-level explanation matters more than the category match. The WARN record is triggered by large, sudden, single-site cuts, the kind that cross the federal notice threshold. A clerical occupation shrinking by a sixth over the decade rarely moves that way. It thins out inside thousands of employers at once: a data entry role not refilled after a retirement, a switchboard position consolidated, a few positions folded into a general office job. Almost none of that reaches the WARN threshold, so it never generates a filing. An occupation can be in steady decline and leave almost no trace in the layoff record.

The scale of the two numbers makes the same point. The WARN notices in Texas in 2025 alone name about five times more workers (24,367) than the entire projected net loss across the state's ten fastest-declining occupations through 2032 (about 4,420). That is not a contradiction. It shows the instruments count different things. WARN notices count gross separations at specific employers. Some of those workers are likely hired into the same occupation elsewhere, though that is an interpretation the data does not measure. BLS projections count the net change in how many people hold an occupation at all.

The divergence runs the other way too. Texas's fastest-growing occupations through 2032 include Nurse Practitioners (+60%), Data Scientists (+53%), Information Security Analysts (+48%), and Software Developers (+47%, from a base of 110,280). Yet the 2025 WARN record includes health-care employers (Christus Health, MedStar Mobile Healthcare) and technology firms (Texas Instruments, DTSV, DLH Solutions). A layoff at a hospital system is not evidence that a healthcare occupation is shrinking, just as a quiet filing record is not evidence that clerical work is stable. Neither signal should be read as the cause or the leading indicator of the other; the data supports describing the relationship, not a mechanism.

The narrower conclusion is this. In Texas in 2025, the job losses you can count came from shocks at specific employers in specific cities. The losses BLS projects come from office work thinning out gradually across the whole economy. A picture of the Texas job market built from only one of those would miss most of the other. (This reading rests on the fifty largest filings by headcount, not all 300. Smaller filings further down the list could include employers closer to clerical work.)

Where the declining occupations' skills go

A structural decline is only half a story if it stops at the loss. Take Data Entry Keyers, the occupation carrying most of Texas's projected clerical loss, and ask where those skills transfer. The occupational-adjacency data returns 648 related occupations ranked by skill overlap. The ten nearest are all office and clerical roles, and the match scores are high:

Adjacent occupation	Skill match	Texas wage range	Outlook flag
Court, Municipal, and License Clerks	85.4%	$39,610 – $49,410
File Clerks	85.2%	$33,000 – $49,080
Office Clerks, General	81.6%	$30,750 – $48,720	Bright Outlook
Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants	81.3%	$41,590 – $62,610
Billing and Posting Clerks	79.7%	$38,500 – $54,050
Tellers	79.5%	$35,730 – $45,550
Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (general)	78.6%	$36,030 – $53,540	Bright Outlook
Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks	78.0%	$44,520 – $62,180
Word Processors and Typists	77.1%	$37,000 – $52,920
Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks	75.8%	$26,790 – $35,210

The skills clearly carry over, with every neighbor above a 75% match. But the moves are sideways. One of the ten, Word Processors and Typists, sits at the top of the same Texas decline list. None of the ten appears on the national fastest-growing report, which covers the top 100 of 566 occupations through 2034. The upside is in pay and stability rather than growth. Legal secretaries and insurance claims processors reach into the low $60,000s at the top of their Texas ranges, well above the data entry keyer's $38,880 median. Office clerks and general administrative assistants carry a Bright Outlook flag. CareerOneStop also associates a small set of credentials with data entry work (three keyword-matched certifications). One of them is a Medical Coder certification from the American Education Certification Association. It points toward records-and-coding work that builds on the same accuracy skills. As with any listed credential, verify current requirements with the issuing organization at aecacert.com.

Switchboard operators show the same shape, with a slightly better neighborhood. Their nearest match is Telephone Operators (89.0%), itself on the Texas decline list. Several of the next nine carry a Bright Outlook flag: Receptionists and Information Clerks (88.2%), Customer Service Representatives (81.1%, $35,420–$48,300 in Texas), and Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (80.4%, $37,170–$47,850). Most of those ranges sit above the switchboard operator's $33,620 Texas median. Again, none reaches the national fastest-growing tier.

The production trades are tighter still. The nearest match for Coil Winders, Tapers, and Finishers is Foundry Mold and Coremakers (70.2%). The nearest match for Foundry Mold and Coremakers is Coil Winders (75.9%). The two declining Texas trades point at each other. Their neighborhoods are also looser than the clerical ones, with top matches in the low 60s to mid 70s rather than the 80s. The few Bright Outlook destinations among them are a sideways step into other hands-on work: Team Assemblers, and Insulation Workers, Mechanical ($46,280–$55,840 in Texas).

Two caveats belong on this pivot. First, adjacency is computed nationally, and these are the ten nearest matches out of several hundred. A wider search would surface more distant destinations that could pay better, and some would need more retraining. Second, the fastest-growing flag is a national signal. It does not certify that an occupation is growing in Texas. Still, the pattern is consistent across all four declining occupations examined here. Texas's declining clerical and production workers have skills that transfer readily, but the nearest destinations are lateral. Reaching the fast-growing tier of the Texas economy — the analysts, developers, and nurse practitioners at the top of the state's growth list — takes a longer step than skill overlap alone can bridge.

Methodology

Layoff data in this article comes from LayoffTracker.us, which compiles records from publicly filed state WARN Act notices. Texas notices are published by the Texas Workforce Commission. The dataset is limited to events that meet WARN thresholds. It excludes states without public WARN disclosure (Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Wyoming). Oklahoma reports events without affected-employee counts. National and cross-state totals, including the national per-event comparison and Texas's share above, therefore reflect only the states that publish, and should be read as a floor on total U.S. activity. Texas itself reports both events and headcount. Every record comes from a state WARN filing; the dataset does not use company press releases or news reports. Records from June 2023 onward are collected in real time, so the 2024 and 2025 figures compared here were both gathered the same way. Industry classification across the dataset is still being enriched. For that reason, this article identifies filings by company name and evident line of business rather than by industry totals. Layoff figures are current as of the data snapshot dated September 17, 2026. For the full layoff-data methodology, see https://www.layofftracker.us/methodology.

Occupational projections and wages come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via CareerOneStop and O*NET. Texas occupational employment projections run through 2032. The national fastest-growing ranking used in the skills section runs through 2034. Wage figures are OEWS medians and percentiles, and adjacent-occupation wages are Texas ranges, all retrieved September 2026. Skill-match scores come from O*NET-based occupational adjacency and are the same in every state. The WARN record and the BLS projections measure different things: one counts formal layoff notices, the other forecasts occupational employment over the long run. This article compares them without treating either as a proxy for, or a cause of, the other.