Job Market
Private employers added 90,000 jobs in September, according to the ADP National Employment Report released September 30, up from a revised 36,000 in August. “It’s a strong report. After a three-month slowdown, job creation rebounded and pay growth remained solid,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist. The gains were not evenly spread, however, either by industry or by employer size.
Where the jobs came from
Education and health services added 55,000 jobs and leisure and hospitality 22,000. Manufacturing added 17,000, construction 15,000, other services 6,000 and information 3,000. Trade, transportation and utilities were flat. Financial activities lost 16,000 jobs, professional and business services lost 11,000, and natural resources and mining lost 1,000. In all, goods-producing industries added 31,000 jobs and service providers 59,000.
The pattern matters because a national total can rise while several large white-collar sectors shrink in the same estimate. ADP revised August down slightly, to 36,000 from 38,000.
Mid-sized employers led
By establishment size, medium employers with 50 to 499 workers added 54,000 jobs, including 36,000 at establishments with 250 to 499 employees. Small establishments with fewer than 50 workers added 23,000, and large ones with 500 or more added 14,000. ADP rounds each grouping separately, so the size categories do not sum exactly to the national total. These are net payroll changes, not counts of job postings or open requisitions, and one month’s size pattern can reverse.
Pay held up
ADP said annual pay growth for people who stayed in their jobs was 3.0% in September, compared with 4.8% for people who changed jobs.
ADP is not the government’s payroll survey
ADP’s report is built from anonymized weekly payroll data covering more than 26 million private-sector employees and is produced with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. It excludes government jobs and uses a different sample and method from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ establishment survey. Reuters, noting the gap between the two series, wrote that “ADP has been a poor gauge of the BLS’ private payrolls estimate.”
BLS publishes the September Employment Situation report on Friday, October 2, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Economists polled by Reuters expected nonfarm payrolls to rise by 90,000 and the unemployment rate to hold at 4.1%. ADP’s 90,000 is an independent reading on private payrolls, not a forecast that the BLS number must match.
What to watch
For job seekers, the sector and size split is more informative than the national total: health care and education kept adding payrolls, while finance and professional services moved the other way. The next checks are Friday’s BLS report, revisions to both series and employer-level hiring data. One month of stronger private payroll growth is useful evidence, but the concentration of the gains argues against calling September a broad hiring rebound.
Sources
- ADP Research, ADP National Employment Report, September 30, 2026. https://mediacenter.adp.com/2026-09-30-ADP-National-Employment-Report-Private-Sector-Employment-Increased-by-90,000-Jobs-in-September
- Reuters, “US private payrolls growth picks up in September, ADP says,” September 30, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/business/us-private-payrolls-growth-picks-up-september-adp-says-2026-09-30/
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, release calendar, October 2026. https://www.bls.gov/schedule/2026/10_sched_list.htm
Featured photo: Workers in a restaurant kitchen in Miami in 2023. Representative image of private-sector employment; it does not show an employer in ADP’s sample. Photo: Phillip Pessar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Cropped from the original.
