Best August ADP Number Since August 2002

The Payroll Company ADP releases its Private Sector Jobs Report the Wednesday prior to the official Employment Situation Report. The ADP report only provides seasonally adjusted  data, and the data is only available to the public back to April of 2002. The data is proprietary data, so what follows is an analysis of the data.

ADP reported the best ever August Jobs Growth number at 237,000. The best August recorded. The next best August reports were August of 2006 with 221,000 jobs added and August of 2004 with 219,000 jobs added.

Service Industry Hits August Record of 104.645 million jobs. The highest level of service jobs during the month of August was set during 2012 and was exceeded each subsequent August. The Goods producing Sector has 20.146 Million jobs, short of the  August 2006 record of 22.544 million workers and up from last August's 19.742 million jobs.

Record Level of jobs in Six Super Sectors. The Education Sector, Leisure and Hospitality Sector, Professional Business Services Sector, Trade, Transportation and Utility Sector , Final Sector and "Other Sector" set record highs for the month of August. The Construction Sec tor, Mining and Natural Resource Sector, and Manufacturing Sectors remain below pre-recession levels. It is important to note that the mining sector had recovered and expanded before the recent contraction in jobs.

Private Sector growth is better now than August 2005, Comparable to August 2011. The annual growth rate exceeded 2% with 2.04% this August. This is up from last August when it was 1.89%. How long it will remain above 2% has yet to be seen. The same could be said for reaching 3%.

The ADP number is difficult to compare to the Employment Situation Report number. The ADP survey has a larger pool than either the Current Population Survey or the Current Employment Statistics data sets. The ADP data is only available to the public as a seasonally adjusted number. There is no published table for the CES Private Sector data. There is a huge variability in the CPS jobs data, and that jobs data delineates between the full-time jobs and part-time jobs. Anyway you look at it, this was the best ADP number during the month of August going back to 2002. This bodes well for a strong August private sector CES number tomorrow, not to be confused with the non-farm payroll data.



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