Looking at not seasonally adjusted and seasonally adjusted private employment from CES (Current Employment Statistics) vs. QCEW and ADP.

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Looking at unadjusted data, CES data is 637 thousand above QCEW for June 2022; and is 837 thousand above ADP for November 2022.

Figure 1: Change in private nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and private QCEW covered employment in US (red), and ADP private nonfarm payroll employment (green), all not seasonally adjusted, all in 000’s, relative to 2022M03=0. Source: BLS, BLS and ADP via FRED and athor’s calculations.

In percentage terms, the gaps are pretty small; the CES series is 0.6 ppts above QCEW in June, and 0.5 ppts in November.

Figure 2: Private nonfarm payroll employment (blue), private QCEW covered employment in US (red), and ADP private nonfarm payroll employment not seasonally adjusted, all in logs, 2022M03=0. Source: BLS, BLS and ADP via FRED, and athor’s calculations.

Finally, for seasonally adjusted data, we have the following picture:

Figure 3: Change in private nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and private QCEW covered employment in US (red), and ADP private nonfarm payroll employment, all in 000’s, relative to 2022M03=0. QCEW adjusted by author using log transformation, Census transformation X-13 and X-11 seasonal adjustment. Source: BLS, BLS and ADP via FREDand athor’s calculations.

As of June, the CES series is 433 thousand below the QCEW series, while the CES series is above the ADP series by 297 thousand in November 2022. Admittedly, however, the QCEW figure is sensitive to how seasonal adjustment is applied (Census X13/seasonal adjustment X-11 vs. moving geometric average).

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