Formal employer-provided severance pay plans became common during the first years of the Great Depression, an apparent reaction to the large-scale layoffs of long-service workers under difficult market conditions. Reasonably consistent series are constructed for severance plan coverage and structure by broad occupational group (office or factory workers) over the next two decades, based on an ambitious series of surveys conducted by the National Industrial Conference Board. By 1953/54, approximately one-third of surveyed companies reported having a formal severance plan for nonexempt salary workers and one-sixth for hourly workers. Surprisingly these coverage levels were only modest more than those of the 1930s. Over much of the period, modal long-service plans offered benefits of a week's pay for each year of service, although many firms, especially those outside the manufacturing sector, offered only flat-rate notice payments of a week or two of pay to office workers. The stability of plan coverage and design in the face of large changes in economic conditions and labor relations suggests that companies rarely revisited severance pay policies.