The Monthly ADP Payroll Report precedes the monthly Employment Situation Report, or Jobs Report, by two days. This month the release is the day before the Jobs Report due to the New Year's Holiday. This column published both an ADP jobs forecast article and an Employment Situation forecast article. The ADP forecast article projected an annual growth rate of over 2% and a seasonally adjusted jobs number of 246,000 to 267,000 jobs added, leaning to the high side because the annual rate of growth tells us where we have been during the past 12 months. The monthly changes, from November to December, projected a possible 300,000 number. The Employment Situation Forecast article anticipated a monthly growth rate of 0.01% to 0.03% which would generate in excess of 225,000 seasonally adjusted (SA) private sector workers added to the economy. There was the potential for in excess of 300,000 SA private sector workers added for this report, too. It all depends on the seasonal factors used to convert the non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) data to the SA data, the revisions to the prior months' data, and the underlying growth rates.
Clintonian Growth. President Trump is seeing a surge in workers and jobs comparable to President Clinton during his first ten months in office. President Trump has added more total NSA Private Sector Current Employment Statistic (CES) workers than President Clinton. President Clinton grew the workforce with a slightly larger growth rate
Downward Revisions to Goods - Upward Revisions to Services. The October ADP data had downward revisions of 44k jobs for Goods Producing Jobs and an upward revision of 33k service jobs. The November revisions were minor with a downward revision of 39k jobs and an upward revision of 37k service jobs. The downward revisions to the October data were offset by the November revision, partially. The upward revision to the service data during October saw another net revision of 4k jobs. The December ADP report can be found here.
December ADP Reported at an increase of 250,000 Jobs. All sectors except the information technology sector saw improvement month to month. Other services gained jobs when it was thought that there might be a drop. The same is true for the Natural Resources Sector.
One of the best annual growth rates since 1999. The 2005 annual ADP growth rate of 2.05% was the best between 1999 and 2010. We saw a rate of growth of 2.27% during 2011. We saw the highest level of growth during 2014 with a rate of 2.46%. Last year it was a sluggish 1.80%. This year's 2.23% was remarkable. It was slightly better than projected.
This is all seasonally adjusted data. This data set is separate and different from the Current Employment Statistics Worker data and the Current Population Survey Jobs data that will be released tomorrow. This only gives us some insight into the general direction that the jobs data may head tomorrow.
It's the economy.