Dal-Tile stopped production at its Florence, Ala., tile plant on Friday, Oct. 16, putting 146 employees out of work with no advance notice, and it will close the Rickwood Road facility for good on Feb. 26, 2027. A Dal-Tile vice president’s social media post blamed the housing market. It’s the second plant making residential building products to go dark this fall.
Many workers found out as they showed up for their Friday shift, the TimesDaily reported; others got a text or an automated call. Employees will receive a lump sum equal to 60 days of wages and benefits. Mayor Ron Tyler said he had no advance word. The plant came to Mohawk Industries, Dal-Tile’s parent, through Marazzi in 2013. The local paper put the job count at 144 from the list attached to the closure letter; the notice to the mayor said 146, per WAFF.
Building product plants are following housing down
Florence isn’t a one-off. Louisiana-Pacific said Sept. 1 it would indefinitely curtail its Jasper, Texas, OSB mill starting in October, taking about 475 million square feet a year of capacity offline. CEO Jason Ringblom said in LP’s release that “current market conditions require us to align OSB production with demand.”
Mohawk flagged the pressure in July. Its second-quarter release said residential channels stayed soft, new home construction was under pressure and existing home sales were weighed down by affordability, while commercial outperformed. It launched a round of capacity optimization, warehouse consolidation and realignment projects meant to save about $60 million, mostly by the end of 2027, at a cost of roughly $50 million. It didn’t name plants then. Florence looks like one of them, though Mohawk hasn’t said so.
Builders are feeling the same thing from the other side. Starts are running about 500,000 below the mid-2000s boom even as builders report wider labor shortages than in 2004-06.
Why the tile plant closure matters on jobsites
For contractors, a single plant closure won’t move tile prices; Mohawk runs a large North American ceramic network and imports compete hard. The signal is different. Manufacturers of housing-heavy products are now cutting fixed capacity rather than just running slower shifts. When volume comes back, it’ll come back to fewer plants, which tends to mean longer lead times on specific SKUs and less room to negotiate on large residential packages.
The way the shutdown happened will also get attention. A Florence attorney told the TimesDaily it’s too early to say whether Dal-Tile met the federal WARN Act’s 60-day notice rule; the 60 days of pay is the usual way companies cover that gap. Mohawk reports third-quarter results later this month. Florence is a fair question for that call.