Private sector hiring in the US decelerated sharply in July even as employers added jobs for a 13th consecutive month.

That was the long and the short of Wednesday’s update from ADP, which missed badly on the headline.

According to the release, private employers added just 44,000 jobs on net last month. That was less than half the prior month’s pace and the weakest showing since January. Consensus expected something closer to 75,000.

The three-month average, which breached 100,000 in June for the first time since February of 2025, slipped back to 87,000.

The details were mixed. By firm size, hiring was broad-based. By sector, leisure and hospitality was the biggest drag, shedding 11,000 positions. Education and health services did the heavy lifting with a 36,000-job addition.

Notably, the spread between annual pay growth for job “changers” and job “stayers” has widened materially in recent months, with the caveat that the data appears to be missing from November to June.

As the figure above shows, the spread between stayers and changers is now 2.6ppt, the widest since last summer.

Conceptually, that’s the “reward for quitting.” The release called it a “clear signal.”

“Job-changers are highly sensitive to real-time economic conditions, and their rapid pay growth implies supply constraints in parts of the labor market,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson remarked.

Notwithstanding the “clarity” on offer from the pay growth disparity, the release was pretty ambiguous, if you ask me. Private employers in the US are still adding jobs, but at the considerable risk of trafficking in macro-market clichés, cross-currents abound and headwinds persist.