ADP reports US private jobs increased by 9,500 per week through August 1

The US labor market just exhaled. ADP’s NER Pulse update shows private employers added an average of 9,500 jobs per week over the four weeks ending August 1, up from the prior reading of 8,250. It’s the first uptick after seven consecutive weeks of the moving average sliding downward. That sounds encouraging until you do the monthly math. Roughly 38,000 jobs per month at that pace is still historically modest, and it follows a July National Employment Report from ADP that clocked in at just 44,000 new private-sector positions. That was the weakest monthly print in six months. What the numbers actually say The NER Pulse, released on Tuesdays at 8:15 a.m. ET with a two-week lag, is designed to bridge the gap between ADP’s monthly snapshots. It draws from anonymized payroll data covering over 26 million employees, giving it a sample size that most surveys would envy. ADP’s monthly report for July, published August 5, painted a complementary picture. The 44,000 jobs added that month represented a sharp deceleration from earlier in the year. And it got worse in the rearview mirror: June’s figure was revised downward to 95,000 from earlier estimates, suggesting that the slowdown was alre...