ADP Picks Up Payrolls and Unemployment Expectations

The big number of the week is of course the Labor Department’s official nonfarm payrolls additions and the unemployment report. Today came one more bit of data from ADP, which may alter or change the expectations for just how strong or weak a report the market is expecting on Friday. The ADP private payrolls for September was put at 162,000. The result is slightly ahead of estimates as Bloomberg was calling for estimates of 140,000 and Dow Jones was calling for a gain of 153,000 for September.

ADP private payroll employment for August was estimated at a gain of 201,000. The BLS number for private payroll employment later posted at an increase of 103,000. The prior August report was revised slightly lower.

The monthly ADP national employment report is taken from a subset of ADP’s business records, which is said to represent roughly 400,000 U.S. businesses and roughly 24 million employees working in all private industrial sectors in the United States.

As far as the official report due this Friday from the Labor Department, Bloomberg expects 113,000 nonfarm payrolls and 130,000 private sector payrolls. The official unemployment rate is expected to remain flat at 8.1%.

Today’s ADP data may create a small uptick in expectations, but this is not such a large gain that it likely will create huge changes to official estimates.

JON C. OGG