National Employment Report in United States

ADP's National Employment Report estimates the monthly change in US private non-farm payrolls, drawn from the anonymised payroll records of ADP's clients, which cover several million workers. Released two business days ahead of the official BLS employment report, markets watch it as an unofficial preview of non-farm payrolls (NFP).

It is compiled anonymously and in aggregate from the payroll data of a large sample of ADP's client firms, broken down by region, sector and company size. The ADP Research Institute publishes the monthly change in private employment in thousands of jobs, together with a breakdown by industry and establishment size.

It anticipates the direction of the labour market and of the main engine of consumption, private employment. A stronger-than-expected reading points to a tight labour market, supportive for the dollar and yields; a weaker one signals softness. It is highly, though imperfectly, correlated with the official non-farm payrolls released a few days later.

It is a private, non-official source, and its figure can diverge from the BLS non-farm payrolls in any given month owing to differences in methodology and sample; it is also subject to revision. It is best read as an approximation rather than a substitute for the official release.