Layoff preparation checklist: 9 things to do before you're let go

Most layoff preparation guides are organized by category — financial, career, legal, psychological — which makes them feel comprehensive and manageable. The problem is that category organization obscures sequencing. You need to know not just what to do but what to do first, in the days and weeks you still have before access disappears and options close.

This checklist is ranked by impact. The first item is the most consequential per unit of time, not the most obvious. The ninth item is still important; it is just less time-sensitive than the first. Do them in order if you can. Do all of them if you can.

"The appraisal of a situation as threatening is not a fixed property of the situation. It is a relationship between environmental demands and the person's resources for meeting them." — Lazarus & Folkman, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping (1984)¹

That distinction — between the demands of the situation and your resources for meeting them — is the most useful reframe for layoff preparation. The checklist below is a resource-building exercise. Each item is something you can do. Each one shifts the balance.

The 9-item checklist

• Calculate your exact monthly runway — today Total liquid savings divided by essential monthly expenses (rent, food, utilities, debt minimums, insurance). The result is your runway in months. If it is under three, you are in urgent territory. If it is over six, you have leverage that most people do not. This calculation takes twenty minutes and changes everything else on the list.
• Export your professional contacts while you still have access From your work email, your CRM, your calendar's frequent contacts. Names, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles. Save to a personal device and personal cloud storage — not a company-issued drive. IT access is often revoked on the day of termination, sometimes within hours of the conversation. This window is finite and you cannot know when it closes.
• Update your resume with current, quantified accomplishments Do not write from memory. Pull your actual performance data while you have access to it: project outcomes, revenue influenced, team size, efficiency gains, cost savings. Quantified accomplishments — "reduced onboarding time by 30%" rather than "improved onboarding process" — perform measurably better with both human reviewers and applicant tracking systems.²
• Understand your severance rights before you need to negotiate them Review your employment contract and your employee handbook. Know what is guaranteed, what is discretionary, and whether your jurisdiction gives you any statutory floor. Many employees accept severance packages without knowing the packages are negotiable. The time to learn this is before the conversation, not during it.
• Model your health insurance transition options In the United States, COBRA continuation coverage is available for up to 18 months after employment ends but at a substantially higher cost than employer-sponsored coverage. Research Marketplace plans, a spouse's plan if applicable, and short-term options. The decision needs to be made quickly after a layoff; having the numbers now removes the time pressure later.
• Activate five weak-tie contacts this week Former managers, past colleagues, people from previous roles who have moved to organizations you respect. Not to ask for a job — to restore a relationship that has gone quiet. Mark Granovetter's 1973 research on job-search effectiveness remains one of the most replicated findings in occupational sociology: weak ties — people you know but do not talk to regularly — consistently provide more useful job leads than close contacts.³ Five messages this week. Short. Specific. Not desperate.
• Save work samples and performance documentation to a personal device Portfolio pieces, project outputs, positive performance reviews, commendations, client feedback — anything that demonstrates your work and would be useful in a reference conversation. Save only what you are permitted to retain under your employment agreement. Do not copy proprietary data or trade secrets.
• Eliminate non-essential recurring expenses this week Streaming services, subscription software, gym memberships, auto-renewing services. Do this now, under caution, not later under pressure. Cutting $200 per month today extends your runway by a measurable amount. Cutting it after a layoff extends it by the same amount — but you will be doing it at a time when your attention is needed for more important things.
• Build a two-sentence professional narrative for your transition What you have done, what you do well, what you are looking for next. Write it down. Say it aloud. The people who have thought about this before they need to say it perform better in early-stage conversations — not because their words are perfect but because they have already processed the framing and are not doing that processing in real time under the scrutiny of an interview.

Why the order matters

Items 1 and 2 are at the top because they are time-constrained in ways the others are not. Your monthly runway calculation depends on data you have access to now. Your professional contact list depends on systems you have access to now. Items 3 through 9 are important, but their window does not close on the day IT locks your account.

Items 5 and 6 — health insurance and network activation — are the most commonly delayed on this list, and the delay is costly in different ways. Health insurance delay tends to be financial: people who discover their COBRA cost on the day of termination sometimes make decisions under sticker shock that they regret. Network delay tends to be strategic: the professional network that you are rebuilding from scratch while unemployed is qualitatively different from the one you are maintaining quietly while still employed. The perceived desperation, and the actual reduced leverage, are real.

Item 9 — the professional narrative — is last because it requires some of the other items to be in place before it stabilizes. It is hard to build a credible "what I'm looking for next" sentence before you know your financial runway, because the runway determines how selective you can actually afford to be.

On the psychology of acting before you're certain

The most common reason people delay this checklist is that working through it feels like conceding something. Preparing for a layoff, in the cognitive logic that psychologists call confirmation bias, can feel like inviting the outcome you're afraid of. This is a predictable but inaccurate framing. Preparation changes your position. It does not change the probability of the event you're preparing for.

Sverke, Hellgren, and Näswall's meta-analysis of job insecurity research, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, found that perceived control over the transition — not certainty about the outcome — was the primary determinant of psychological well-being during job insecurity.⁴ Workers who took concrete steps reported lower anxiety and better outcomes than workers who waited for certainty before acting. The certainty never came for most of them. The ones who waited are the control group in that research. They are not the result to aim for.

If you have not yet assessed where you actually stand, the Layoff Risk Check below gives you a risk level and four specific actions calibrated to your situation.

For the full 30-day breakdown of each preparation phase, read What to do before a layoff: the 30-day preparation checklist. For the behavioral science behind why warning signs are hard to interpret clearly, see How to read workplace warning signs.