Private employers added 122,000 jobs in December, ADP said Wednesday, describing a “modest” pace of hiring and slower pay gains.

The result counted as a miss. Consensus was looking for 139,000 from the headline. The range of guesses was 100,000 at the low-end to 160,000 on the high-end.

It wouldn’t be accurate to call the headline a “disappointment” exactly, but it did represent the slowest pace of private payroll growth since late-summer, when the Fed panicked about the labor market on the way to delivering an outsized rate cut at September’s FOMC meeting.

The three-month average is now 151,000, not indicative of any sort of broader economic downturn.

“The labor market downshifted to a more modest pace of growth in the final month of 2024,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson remarked.

The vast majority of December’s net gain was attributable to large firms. Employers with 500 or more workers added 97,000 jobs. Education, leisure and hospitality and construction hired the most, while manufacturing shed 27,000 workers. (“We’re bringing back American manufacturing jobs!” lied every US president.)

On the pay growth front, annual wage gains for so-called “stayers” decelerated to 4.6%, the slowest since July of 2021.

Job “changers,” meanwhile, enjoyed pay gains exceeding 7%. The gap between the two remains quite pronounced.

The data came on the heels of a JOLTS update which showed more than eight million open jobs at the beginning of December, even as other metrics from the release pointed to ongoing “normalization,” to use the Fed’s favorite action verb.

As a quick aside, the median annual pay for “stayers” was $59,400 in December, according to ADP. Suffice to say no household — i.e., no family — could survive comfortably on that in today’s America, or at least not if you have more than one child, your employer doesn’t offer outstanding benefits and you don’t live in the middle of nowhere.

In any event, the slightly soft readout from ADP may actually be welcome news for the Fed — and also for besieged bonds — at a time when markets are palpably concerned about rekindled inflation in a “no landing” scenario.