ADP National Employment Report: Private Sector Employment Increased by 41,000 Jobs in December; Annual Pay was Up 4.4%

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: PR Newswire

ADP National Employment Report: Private Sector Employment Increased by 41,000 Jobs in December; Annual Pay was Up 4.4%

News provided by
ADP, Inc.
Jan 07, 2026, 08:15 ET

ROSELAND, N.J., Jan. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Private sector employment increased by 41,000 jobs in December and pay was up 4.4 percent year-over-year according to the December ADP National Employment Report produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab {"Stanford Lab"}. (1)

The ADP National Employment Report is an independent measure of the labor market based on the anonymized weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees in the United States. ADP's Pay Insights captures over 15 million individual pay change observations each month. Together, the jobs report and pay insights use ADP's fine-grained data to provide a representative and high-frequency picture of the private-sector labor market.

"Small establishments recovered from November job losses with positive end-of-year hiring, even as large employers pulled back," said Dr. Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP.

{snip}

(1) http://www.adpemploymentreport.com/

Read more: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/adp-national-employment-report-private-sector-employment-increased-by-41-000-jobs-in-december-annual-pay-was-up-4-4-302655164.html

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Let me guess: you don't trust anything coming from the government.

Read this carefully:

http://www.adpemploymentreport.com/

It's adpemploymentreport.com, not adpemploymentreport.gov.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Lovie777]

1. Nope..............

[SheltieLover]

2. Sure it did. No doubt why nobody can find job.

[Ray Bruns]

3. Is it me or is that rather a lackluster new jobs number. And how many of those jobs were seasonal?

[progree]

7. Dunno how many are seasonal. But note that ADP reports seasonally adjusted numbers

https://adpemploymentreport.com/

Click on Technical Notes to expand it:

Nationally representative measure of weekly employment

Seasonally adjusted measure of employment

as does the BLS, who reports their numbers Friday, but inevitably people will post that the numbers are good (or not too bad) only because of seasonal hires.

Back to ADP - I found this as far as seasonally adjusted numbers and not-seasonally adjusted numbers

Monthly, Not Seasonally Adjusted https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ADPMNUSNERNSA
November:136,270,000
December 136,109,000
DECREASE: 161,000

Seasonally Adjusted: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ADPMNUSNERSA
November: 134,547,000
December: 134,588,000
Increase:: 41,000
(as reported in media articles and https://adpemploymentreport.com/ )

So their seasonal adjustment process turned a 161,000 decrease in jobs to a 41,000 increase.

Interesting.

Several FRED series on ADP data - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/32250

[bucolic_frolic]

4. Mid-Atlantic was strongest, everything else so-so

Manufacturing lost jobs, health care gained, which just about explains mid-Atlantic. Pacific took a drubbing.

This is the peak hire time of year, prepping for the new year. Not a good look going forward.

[PSPS]

5. Remember that this covers only ADP's customers, not the country as a whole

With the reputation of the BLS now destroyed, we'll never know the real numbers.

[progree]

6. ADP is a private payrolls processing company, not BLS or other government

ADP processes payrolls for about 20% of the private work force. They estimate the other 80% by some means described in the URL below. Anyway, they are meant to be an estimate of the national private sector workforce.

https://adpemploymentreport.com/

Click on Technical Notes to expand it:

Nationally representative measure of weekly employment

Seasonally adjusted measure of employment

While I'm at it - I saw a comment in another thread about being positive only because of seasonal hiring ... ADP reports seasonally adjusted numbers (as does the BLS).

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. The white-collar jobs wipeout shows no sign of slowing

Economic Indicators

The white-collar jobs wipeout shows no sign of slowing

Beneath headline employment growth, a new ADP jobs report shows major contraction in the white-collar labor market, especially in tech and consulting

By Catherine Baab
Published 11 hours ago

Private employers added 41,000 jobs in December, according to ADP’s latest data release on Wednesday, a modest rebound from November’s losses. But beneath the headline growth, the composition of hiring portrayed a far more fragile — and even frightening — picture of the underlying economy.

Here's what to know.

An ugly white-collar job contraction

Job losses were heavily concentrated in sectors most closely tied to business confidence and corporate investment. Professional and business services lost 29,000 jobs, while information services lost 12,000, wiping out the entire net gain on their own. Manufacturing employment also fell.

These declines were offset by gains in education and health services, leisure, and hospitality — sectors that are, generally speaking, much more insulated from economic cycles because demand remains relatively steady regardless of growth conditions.

{snip}

[Skittles]

9. we need, what, 150,000 jobs just to keep up with new college grads?

[hatrack]

10. Well, population growth generally, so anybody joining the workforce . . . diploma, undergraduate, graduate

.