ADP® Reports Private Sector Employment and Compensation Both Increased in January

According to the ADP National Employment Report released on Wednesday, US private sector employment increased by 183,000 jobs in January. Meanwhile, compensation was up 5.7% year-over-year.

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:

“We had a strong start to 2025, but it masked a dichotomy in the labor market. Consumer-facing industries drove hiring, while job growth was weaker in business services and production.”