ADP Launches Major Weekly Report! Is the Market Welcoming a New Benchmark for Employment Data?

During the special period of the ‘absence’ of official economic data, ADP announced that it would publicly release on a weekly basis its ‘secret weapon,’ previously provided exclusively for the Fed’s reference…

Amid the government shutdown, ADP Research will now begin releasing weekly employment data for the United States as a supplement to its monthly report, aiming to provide high-frequency insights into the labor market.

The data represents the four-week moving average of changes in total private sector employment and will be released at 8:15 PM Beijing time every Tuesday.

According to a statement by ADP on Tuesday, the average increase in employment over the four weeks ending October 11 was 142,500 people.

It was reported that ADP had been providing the Federal Reserve with a weekly employment data series for policymakers’ insights into the private sector job market. However, after Fed Governor Christopher Waller cited these statistics in a speech on August 28, the payroll services company ceased providing the data, which covered approximately 20% of the U.S. private sector workforce.

It remains unclear why the data-sharing agreement was suspended. In a letter on Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren questioned the reasons behind this move by the company and urged it to make the data public—at least during the government shutdown period.

Since the government shutdown earlier this month, third-party data sources have become particularly valuable as agencies responsible for compiling economic statistics have halted the release of official data. Other companies, such as LinkedIn Corp. and Revelio Labs, are also providing insights into the job market.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is responsible for publishing the government’s monthly employment report, will likely have to postpone the release of the October employment data originally scheduled for November 7. ADP will continue to release its monthly estimates, with the October report due out on November 5.

Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, stated in the release, “For nearly two decades, we have provided our invaluable labor market data to the public free of charge through the ADP National Employment Report. The near real-time employment data published weekly by ADP will offer a clearer picture of the labor market during this critical economic juncture.”

Market participants widely expect Federal Reserve officials to cut interest rates at this week’s policy meeting in an effort to boost the cooling U.S. labor market. Both government and private sector data indicate that employers have slowed hiring in recent months, and demand for workers has eased.

According to weekly unemployment insurance claims filings at the state level, companies including Amazon, General Motors, and Applied Materials have announced layoffs in recent weeks, although widespread layoffs remain limited.

The ADP data, compiled in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, is based on weekly payroll data from more than 26 million private-sector employees.