Private sector US employers added 140,000 jobs in February, ADP said Wednesday.

The headline was remarkable for being mostly congruent with consensus, which expected 150,000. No surprises here. If no news is good news, then ADP was good news.

The range of guesses from two-dozen people who’re wasting math skills that could be put to better use virtually anywhere else, was 75,000 to 200,000.

January’s headline was revised to show a 111,000 gain. The three-month moving average is now 136,333. So, pretty much exactly in line with February’s pace.

Under the hood, the report suggested job gains were almost uniform across firm sizes and industries. Only mining and information shed jobs (6,000 between them). Leisure and hospitality led gains with 41,000, followed by construction (28,000) and trade/transportation (24,000).

ADP chief economist Nela Richardson described the report as “solid.”

On the wage front, ADP’s “Pay Insights” showed a meaningful pick up in pay gains for job switchers, while compensation growth for “stayers” decelerated further.

The 0.4ppt change in the YoY rate of pay growth for job changers was the first since November of 2022 and the largest since April of that year.

I wouldn’t make too much of that, but it’s suboptimal. The higher the potential reward for changing jobs, the more labor market churn there’s likely to be. That can be self-fulfilling to the extent it fosters competition for scarce workers. The attendant upward pressure on wages is inflationary, or at least it could be.

For job stayers, pay growth was 5.1% in February, the slowest pace since August of 2021.

“Pay gains are trending lower but are still above inflation,” Richardson went on, adding that overall, the latest ADP release “doesn’t tip the scales in terms of a Fed rate decision this year.”