ADP: 428,000 Private Payrolls Added in August

This morning, ADP reported that 428,000 private payroll jobs were created last month. That sounds impressive but it is still way short of Wall Street’s estimate for 1,170,000.

Big business dominated job creation, as firms with more than 500 employees added 298,000 workers. Medium-sized businesses were next with 79,000 while companies with fewer than 50 workers grew by 52,000.

Job creation skewed heavily to services, which added 389,000 compared with the 40,000 for goods producers. (The total doesn’t add up to 428,000 due to rounding.)

After lagging through the early part of the pandemic recovery, leisure and hospitality led with 129,000 new jobs while education and health services contributed 100,000 and professional and business services grew by 66,000. Construction also added 28,000 and manufacturing was up 9,000.

Tomorrow we’ll get another jobless-claims report. After persistent declines, that data series has been a little more volatile in recent weeks. Right now, we’re trending at about one million. Continuing claims have drifted lower and are currently at 14 million.

The big jobs report comes out on Friday. The unemployment rate is currently at 10.2%. That may fall back into the single digits. Economists expect non-farm payrolls to rise by 1.4 million.

Posted by on September 2nd, 2020 at 10:39 am


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