Short answer. At least one month. Article 283 requires the employer to serve a written notice on the workers and the Ministry of Labor and Employment at least one (1) month before the intended date of a retrenchment, redundancy, labor-saving installation, or closure. Both notices are required, not just one or the other.
What the law says
by serving a written notice on the workers and the Ministry of Labor and Employment at least one (1) month before the intended date thereof.
Labor Code, Article 283 — Closure And Personnel Reduction. Read the full provision →
One month, and to both recipients
Article 283 sets a single, specific deadline for closures, redundancy, retrenchment to prevent losses, and installation of labor-saving devices: written notice at least one (1) month before the intended date. The article names two recipients explicitly — the workers and the Ministry of Labor and Employment — so notifying one without the other does not satisfy the requirement. A closure announced to employees the same week it happens, or one reported to the labor ministry but never communicated to the workers themselves, falls short of what this article demands.
The notice period covers several distinct grounds
The one-month requirement is not limited to retrenchment alone. Article 283 groups four situations under the same notice rule: installation of labor-saving devices, redundancy, retrenchment to prevent losses, and closure or cessation of operations. Whichever of these actually describes your employer's situation, the same minimum notice period applies to all of them. The article also flags one limit worth knowing: a closure used as a pretext for the purpose of circumventing the protections in this part of the Code is not the kind of closure the provision is meant to authorize. This one-month notice rule is specific to these four authorized causes. It does not apply to a dismissal for a just cause under Article 282, such as serious misconduct or fraud — that is a separate ground governed by its own provision, not by the notice-and-pay scheme in Article 283.
Notice and separation pay are separate requirements
Advance notice is not the only thing Article 283 requires — it also sets separation pay depending on the ground. Termination due to labor-saving devices or redundancy carries separation pay of at least one month's pay, or one month per year of service, whichever is higher. Retrenchment to prevent losses, or closures not caused by serious business losses, carry a lower rate: one month's pay or half a month's pay per year of service, whichever is higher, with a fraction of at least six months counted as a full year. Notice and pay are both required; meeting one does not excuse the other.
The qualifier inside the separation-pay rule
One phrase in the pay provision does a great deal of work and is easy to read straight past. The half-month rate is set for retrenchment to prevent losses and in cases of closures or cessation of operations of establishment or undertaking not due to serious business losses or financial reverses. The final qualifier is doing the limiting: the article fixes that rate for closures which are not caused by serious business losses, and says nothing at this point about the rate where the closure genuinely is. Whether the employer's losses were serious is therefore a question of proof rather than assertion, and it is what most disputes over a closure are really about. The notice requirement, by contrast, does not bend with the employer's finances — the one-month written notice to both the workers and the ministry is stated flatly, with no exception for a business in distress.