US private sector employers added 534,000 jobs in November, ADP said Wednesday.
That was slightly ahead of estimates and appeared to bode well for Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report.
The range, from 31 economists surveyed, was 380,000 to 750,000.
November marked the third consecutive month of 500,000+ NFP headline prints.
The data came with the usual caveat: ADP hasn’t been the best predictor of NFP in the post-pandemic era. Hopefully, it’ll be at least a semblance of prescient for November. Consensus expects ~530,000 from Friday’s key jobs report.
Within ADP, gains were relatively broad-based, although large firms added the most positions last month. The services sector added 424,000 jobs, 136,000 of which were in leisure and hospitality.
The three-month pace of gains in the sector is above 500,000 (figure below).
Still, there’s a long way to go to reach pre-pandemic levels of employment in some hard-hit areas of the services sector.
The Omicron scare renders the November labor market figures a bit stale, but the Fed is plainly focused on the data (just ask Jerome Powell), so labor market improvement and especially further evidence of wage growth will likely embolden the Committee to proceed with normalization, barring a turn for the absolute worst vis-à-vis the new virus variant.
“The labor market recovery continued to power through challenges last month,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said, adding that “it’s too early to tell if Omicron could potentially slow the jobs recovery in coming months.”
BMO’s US rates team called it “a remarkably as-expected update on the US jobs market.”
In a week that’s already delivered its share of drama, “as-expected” may be just what the doctor ordered.
