ADP Research Institute

The ADP National Employment Report is a monthly measure of the change in total U.S. nonfarm private employment derived from actual, anonymous payroll data of client companies served by ADP , a leading provider of human capital management solutions. The report, which measures nearly 24 million U.S. workers, is produced by the ADP Research Institute , a specialized group within the company that provides insights around employment trends and workforce strategy, in collaboration with Moody’s Analytics, Inc. Each month, ADP issues the ADP National Employment Report as part of the company’s commitment to adding deeper insights into the U.S. labor market and providing businesses, governments and others with a source of credible and valuable information. The ADP National Employment Report is broadly distributed to the public each month, free of charge. The data for this report is collected for pay periods that can be interpolated to include the week of the 12th of each month, and processed with statistical methodologies similar to those used by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to compute employment from its monthly survey of establishments. Due to this processing, this subset is modified to make it indicative of national employment levels; therefore, the resulting employment changes computed for the ADP National Employment Report are not representative of changes in ADP’s total base of U.S. business clients. The analysis begins with the processing of files from 2001 through the most recent month. The steps involved include the removal of outliers, classification by industry and size class, the creation of matched pairs, seasonal adjustment, and adjustments to mimic the industry and size distribution of the BLS’ employment data. The files are monthly through 2006 and biweekly thereafter. Since August 2009 ADP has also created weekly files. Moody’s Analytics uses the following data fields from ADP’s weekly files: number of employees, frequency of payment, processing date of payment, industry and location of establishment (where payrolls are processed), and whether the establishment is active or terminated. A company may process the payrolls of employees that work in a number of locations in one central location or a company may process payrolls in several locations.