Private-sector hiring in the US was the strongest last month since January of 2025, ADP said Wednesday.

The headline print, a net 109,000-job addition for April, was a slight miss to consensus, but directionally speaking it added to a string of upbeat reports which together suggest the US labor market’s unfazed by the war.

In the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s release, ADP’s higher-frequency series showed meaningful momentum. The monthly tally was confirmatory in that regard.

As the figure reminds you, revisions to ADP’s series now show a private-sector hiring impulse that recovered from the tariff shock midway through last summer and managed to sustain monthly gains thereafter.

Hiring was broad-based in April, both by firm size and industry, although mid-sized firms were more reticent than small enterprises and big business.

“Large companies have resources to deploy, and small ones are the most nimble, both important advantages in a complex labor environment,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson explained.

Among major sectors, only professional and business services shed jobs (the generic “other services” category also showed a small decline), perhaps a reflection of AI-related layoffs and attrition.

Education and health led gains with more than 60,000 new positions. On the goods side, construction hired the most, with 10,000 additions. You could argue that’s suboptimal to the extent education and health services is often derided as quasi-government hiring, while construction just reflects the housing shortage.

I tend to dislike that sort of analysis, though, as it treads perilously close to the old “If you strip out all the good news, this was a bad release” trick.

Pay growth was mostly steady for so-called job “stayers” (4.4% YoY) and the annual growth rate for “changers” was unchanged at 6.6%.

The strong showing for ADP comes on the heels of the BLS’s JOLTS release, which reflected the largest month-to-month hiring increase in 25 years excluding 2020.

Last week, the Labor Department said initial jobless claims fell to the lowest since 1969 at the end of April.