First Look at December: ADP Says 202K New Nonfarm Private Jobs

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). Today we have the ADP December estimate of 202K new nonfarm private employment jobs, an increase over the ADP revised November figure of 124K.

The 202K estimate came in above the Investing.com consensus of 160K for the ADP number.

The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 152K new private nonfarm private jobs and the unemployment rate to remain at 3.5%. Their forecast for the December full nonfarm new jobs is (the PAYEMS number) 164K.

Here is an excerpt from today's ADP report press release:

“As 2019 came to a close, we saw expanded payrolls in December,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “The service providers posted the largest gain since April, driven mainly by professional and business services. Job creation was strong across companies of all sizes, led predominantly by midsized companies.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “Looking through the monthly vagaries of the data, job gains continue to moderate. Manufacturers, energy producers and small companies have been shedding jobs. Unemployment is low, but will begin to rise if job growth slows much further.”

Here is a visualization of the two series over the previous twelve months.