ADP National Employment Report: 183K Private Jobs Added in January

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 183,000 nonfarm private jobs were added in January, higher than the expected 148,000 addition.

The forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is that 154,000 jobs were added in January. 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:

“We had a strong start to 2025 but it masked a dichotomy in the labor market,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP. “Consumer-facing industries drove hiring, while job growth was weaker in business services and production.”

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 193,000, up from 170,000 in December. This is the highest level since February 2023.

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 875,000 and has recently dropped back to pre-pandemic levels.