ADP Employment Report: +42,000 Jobs in October; wages +4.5% for “Job Stayers” and +6.7% for “Job Changers.”
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

According to payroll processing firm ADP, the private sector created 42,000 jobs in October, after two months of declines.

But the two prior months, so employment in September and August, had gotten hammered by the massive annual adjustment for the 12-month period through March 2025, to benchmark ADP’s data to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in September. These adjustments had nothing to do with employment in August and September, but with employment through March 2025.

The annual adjustment had turned the small growth in September of 11,000 into a job loss of 32,000 – which today was re-revised to -29,000. And it had turned the job growth in August of +54,000 into a job loss of -3,000.

Total employment in the private sector rose to 134.57 million, up by 977,000 jobs from a year ago.

The chart of private-sector employment shows the trend: Job growth continued in 2025 but at a much slower pace than in prior years.

Year-to-date 2025, jobs added: 597,000
Same period in 2024, jobs added: 1.33 million.

Median wages increased year-over-year for:

“Job Stayers”: +4.5%, roughly the same yoy increase for the seventh month in a row.
“Job Changers”: +6.7%, same yoy increase as in the prior month, but less than the increases of 7.0% to 7.1% in the mid-year period.

The wage data from ADP is based on a subset of 14.8 million workers employed for at least 12 months, whose paychecks ADP processed.

Due to the government shutdown, the BLS will not release its employment report this Friday, and the ADP data here, plus unemployment insurance claims data released by the 50 states individually, and some private-sector tidbits are all we get for now in terms of payroll count and wages for October.

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WOLF STREET FEATURE: Daily Market Insights by Chris Vermeulen, Chief Investment Officer, TheTechnicalTraders.com.