Photo: ADPDigital / CC BY-SA 4.0 (archive photo)
U.S. private employers added 86,000 jobs in October, ADP reported Wednesday, keeping hiring at the same pace as September while gains in trade, health care and hospitality outweighed losses in professional services.
The payroll processor revised September’s increase down to 86,000 from 90,000. October’s result was slightly above the 75,000 Dow Jones estimate cited by CNBC, but it was not an acceleration from the revised previous month.
For job seekers, the report points to a market that is still adding positions, with opportunity unevenly spread across industries. For employers, it shows continuing competition for workers alongside pockets of weakness, rather than a uniform hiring boom.
Services lead, but business services lose jobs
Trade, transportation and utilities added 39,000 positions, education and health services gained 28,000, and leisure and hospitality added 19,000, according to ADP. Financial activities added 15,000 and construction gained 13,000.
Professional and business services lost 27,000 jobs, its third straight monthly decline. Natural resources and mining lost 8,000, information lost 2,000 and manufacturing shed 1,000. Overall, service providers added 82,000 positions and goods-producing employers added 4,000.
Employers in all size groups increased hiring. Those gains do not mean every company in a growing industry is expanding, or that an applicant will find the same conditions in every local market.
Base pay and total pay tell different stories
Across private-sector workers, median base pay rose 3.2% from a year earlier, while gross pay rose 4.7%. Those are different measures: gross pay can include bonuses, overtime and additional hours as well as base wages.
Workers staying in their jobs saw base pay rise 3.0%, compared with 4.8% for job changers. Gross pay increased 4.4% for stayers and 7.6% for changers. The 3.2% and 4.7% all-worker figures should not be confused with the stayer and changer figures.
ADP Chief Economist Nela Richardson said job changers were being drawn by a combination of bonuses, overtime, more hours and higher base pay. For someone comparing job offers, that makes the mix of guaranteed pay and variable compensation important, not only the advertised total.
This is not the government’s jobs report
ADP’s report is an independent measure based on anonymized weekly payroll data covering more than 26 million private-sector employees. Its pay analysis compares individual workers’ earnings over 12-month intervals.
The report does not measure government hiring and does not supply the U.S. unemployment rate. It should not be treated as the government’s monthly payroll report or as a guaranteed preview of that separate release.
For a business setting a staffing budget, the useful signal is the split between continued hiring and uneven industry demand. For households, annual pay growth alone does not show whether purchasing power has improved: that also depends on the prices they pay and the hours they work.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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