The ADP National Employment Report (Automatic Data Processing) is computed from a subset of ADP records. It is a measure of employment derived from an anonymous subset of roughly 500,000 U.S. business clients. During 2011, this subset averaged about 344,000 U.S. business clients and represented over 21 million U.S. employees working in all of the 19 major North American Industrial Classification (NAICS) private industrial sectors.

The ADP National Employment Report is released monthly, and used by economists, policy-makers and financial professionals as a timely and accurate resource for estimates in national labor market movements.

The data are 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. ADP contracted with Macroeconomic Advisors, LLC to compute a monthly report that would ultimately help to predict monthly nonfarm payrolls from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s employment situation. The ADP report only covers private (excluding government) payrolls at this time.

As a simplification of the process used by Macroeconomic Advisors, estimates are based upon statistical comparison of ADP growth rates to BLS payroll employment growth rates at the industry level. ADP also adds in the BLS initial claims data for the week just prior to the employment report as part of its estimation procedure.

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