U.S. private employers added 38,000 jobs in August, according to the ADP National Employment Report produced with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
That was the slowest monthly gain since January. Goods-producing industries lost 10,000 jobs. Service providers added 48,000. Education and health services led with 45,000. Construction added 12,000 and leisure and hospitality 16,000. Manufacturing cut 17,000. Professional and business services fell by 16,000. Information and trade, transportation and utilities also declined.
Large firms with 500 or more employees added 34,000 jobs. Small establishments added 3,000. Medium-sized employers were unchanged. By region, the Northeast gained 38,000 jobs. The Midwest added 5,000 and the South 3,000. The West lost 8,000. July’s total was revised up to 46,000 from 44,000.
ADP Pay Insights showed base pay up 3.2 percent from a year earlier and gross pay up 4.7 percent. Job-stayers saw 3.0 percent base-pay growth and 4.4 percent gross-pay growth. Job-changers gained 4.7 percent in base pay and 7.3 percent in gross pay.
“Pay can tell us a lot about today’s choppy hiring. To understand hiring patterns, you have to look deeply into where pay growth is accelerating, where it’s slowing, and for whom,” said Dr. Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP.
“Once predictable wage growth has been overtaken by complexities of demographic change, persistent inflation, and AI’s effects on jobs,” Richardson said. “Our new Pay Insights report, with its enhanced data, can more fully reveal the dynamics of today’s labor market.”
Liv Wang, lead data scientist at ADP Research, said the expanded report now tracks base pay, gross pay and distribution across 56 metro areas. “With its extended history, added dimensions of base pay and distribution, and granular metro information, Pay Insights more fully captures the pay structure of the U.S. labor market and how it’s changing over time.”
“Our August release, for example, shows that pay growth has been decelerating for the past four years,” Wang said. “Among lower-paid workers in particular, base pay growth has lost momentum and now is slower than it was prior to the pandemic.”
The report is based on anonymized weekly payroll data covering more than 26 million private-sector employees. The September report is scheduled for Sept. 30.
