ADP® Reports Private Sector Employment Gains and Increased Compensation in February

According to the January ADP® National Employment Report™ released Wednesday (3-8-23), nonfarm private sector employment increased by 242,000 jobs in February and annual pay was up 7.2% year-over-year. The ADP National Employment Report is produced by the ADP Research Institute® in collaboration with Stanford Digital Economy Lab (“Stanford Lab”).

The jobs report and pay insights use ADP’s fine-grained anonymized and aggregated payroll data of over 25 million US employees to provide a representative picture of the labor market. The report details the current month’s total private employment change and weekly job data from the previous month. ADP’s pay measure uniquely captures the earnings of a cohort of almost 10 million employees over a 12-month period.

Adding additional background and her analysis to the January report, Dr. Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist, said:

“There is a tradeoff in the labor market right now. We’re seeing robust hiring, which is good for the economy and workers, but pay growth is still quite elevated. The modest slowdown in pay increases, on its own, is unlikely to drive down inflation rapidly in the near term.”