cnn.com - Adp private jobs report september

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is unlikely to release the monthly jobs report this Friday due to the closure. That means many flying blind without critical economic data are having to key into any information they can get, including Wednesday’s private sector jobs data from payroll company ADP.

Private payrolls plunged in September, complicating the picture for the US economy as policymakers and investors struggle to assess the state of the labor market amid a government shutdown.

While ADP’s estimates don’t often correlate with the official monthly jobs numbers when they’re released days later — and have been frequently criticized by economists for having a poor track record in making short-term predictions — the report is still considered an indicator of the labor market’s trajectory.

And that outlook has been looking increasingly bleak. In addition to the private-sector job losses, the latest (and last-for-now) release from the BLS showed that the US labor market activity has grown increasingly stagnant.

US private-sector businesses lost 32,000 jobs in September, according to the report. August’s previously estimated 54,000 payroll gains were downwardly revised to negative 3,000.

However, ADP’s latest numbers come with some big caveats: A preliminary “rebenchmarking” of the data was a significant factor behind the negative August revision and September’s estimated job losses, ADP’s chief economist Nela Richardson said Wednesday.

“We found that once we benchmarked that data, it actually shows a September slowdown that has been consistent with what we’ve been reporting all year,” Richardson told reporters Wednesday, noting the process resulted in a reduction of 43,000 jobs in September, compared to pre-benchmarked data.

“In fact, though the numbers changed, the story and the narrative and the trend remain the same: Hiring momentum has slowed from the beginning of the year through September,” she added.

Similar to the BLS’s two-step annual process, ADP recalibrates its estimates annually to the full-year 2024 Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. The report provides a more comprehensive read on the number of businesses, employees and wages at the state, regional and county level because it derives that data from quarterly tax reports submitted by businesses to their states. However, the QCEW is heavily lagged.

Jeff