ADP Says U.S. Companies Add Most Workers in Eight Months
Employment accelerated in October as company payrolls expanded the most in eight months, an indication the U.S. labor market was on the upswing at the start of the fourth quarter, according to a private report based on payrolls.
The 158,000 increase followed a revised 114,000 gain in September, data from the Roseland, New Jersey-based ADP Research Institute showed today. This is the first ADP report derived using a larger sample and new methodology.
This is even better news than normal because they
recently changed their methodology and that change resulted in a halving of their recent monthly reports. For instance Sept was originally 162k but applying the new methodology retroactively reduced it almost by half to 88k. Similarly, August was revised from 189k to 76k.
This is the first month where they are reporting using the new methodology (to more closely align with the numbers BLS will report) so I expected it to be similar to the revised Aug/Sep number, somewhere around 80k. The fact that it came in at 158k is hopefully good news for the BLS report that will be issued tomorrow.