ADP National Employment Report

The ADP National Employment Report is a monthly estimate of the change in private-sector employment in the United States, produced by the payroll processor ADP from its own client payroll records. It is released a couple of days before the Bureau of Labor Statistics' non-farm payrolls figure and is watched as an early read on the same month's labour market. The two are not measuring quite the same thing. ADP covers private payrolls only, excludes government hiring, and is built from the firms that happen to use ADP for payroll rather than from a statistical survey sample, so the month-to-month correlation with non-farm payrolls is loose enough that trading it as a proxy is unreliable — it has landed well wide of the official print more than once. Its methodology was rebuilt in 2022 to publish employment change alongside a measure of pay for job-stayers and job-changers. The practical use is as a tone-setter for expectations going into payrolls day rather than as a substitute for it.