ADP National Employment Report: 122K Private Jobs Added in July

The economic mover and shaker this week is Friday's employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This monthly report contains a wealth of data for economists, the most publicized being the month-over-month change in Total Nonfarm Employment (the PAYEMS series in the FRED repository). However, each month a few days before we receive the highly anticipated jobs report, ADP releases their data on new nonfarm private jobs.

The ADP employment report revealed that 122K nonfarm private jobs were added in July, the smallest addition in the past six months. The latest reading came in lower than the expected 147K addition of new private jobs and marks the fourth straight month that private sector hiring has slowed.

The forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is that 155,000 private nonfarm jobs were added in July. However, the forecast for the full nonfarm jobs (the PAYEMS number) is for 177,000 jobs to have been added. Here is a visualization of the two series over the past twelve months.

ADP employment versus BLS employment

Here is an excerpt from today's ADP report press release:

“With wage growth abating, the labor market is playing along with the Federal Reserve's effort to slow inflation,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP. “If inflation goes back up, it won't be because of labor.”

Here is a snapshot of the monthly change in the ADP headline number since the company's earliest published data with the new methodology in 2010. This is quite a volatile series, so we've plotted the monthly data points as dots along with a six-month moving average, which gives us a clearer sense of the trend. The latest six-month moving average is 168,000, up from 166,000 in June.

ADP Nonfarm Private EmploymentAs we see in the chart above, the trend peaked in September 2015 and then went negative for the first time in late 2019, just before the NBER declared a recession start. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought employment numbers down to levels we have never seen this century. The trend reached a new high in 2021 at 778,000 and has recently dropped back to pre-pandemic levels.