ADP Reports Private Sector Employment and Compensation Both Increased in December

Private sector US employment increased by 122,000 jobs in December, according to the ADP National Employment Report released on Wednesday. Year-over-year, annual compensation was up 4.6%.

The jobs report and pay insights use ADP’s fine-grained anonymized and aggregated payroll data to provide a representative picture of the private-sector labor market. The report details the current month’s total private employment change, and weekly job data from the previous month. Because the underlying ADP payroll databases are continuously updated, the report provides a high frequency, near real-time measure of US employment. This measure reflects the number of employees on ADP client payrolls (Payroll Employment) to provide a richer understanding of the labor market. ADP’s pay measure uniquely captures the earnings of a cohort of almost 10 million employees over a 12-month period.

Commenting on the report, ADP Chief Economist Nela Richardson said:

“The labor market downshifted to a more modest pace of growth in the final month of 2024, with a slowdown in both hiring and pay gains. Health care stood out in the second half of the year, creating more jobs than any other sector.”