Private sector employment increased by 22,000 jobs in January and pay was up 4.5% year-over-year, according to the January ADP National Employment Report, produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab (“Stanford Lab”).
The report is an independent measure of the labor market based on the anonymized weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees in the United States. It’s the only jobs report for now as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) numbers have been delayed due to the recent government shutdown. The primary differences between the reports are ADP measures only private sector jobs while the BLS is a more comprehensive report that includes both private-sector and federal, state and local and government jobs.
The BLS report will be released Feb. 11.
According to the ADP report, within private employment, construction jobs nationwide saw a gain of 9,000, with manufacturing down 8,000. Professional/business services plummeted by 57,000 jobs.
ADP’s Pay Insights captures over 15 million individual pay change observations each month. Together, the jobs report and pay insights use ADP’s fine-grained data to provide a representative and high-frequency picture of the private-sector labor market.
“Job creation took a step back in 2025, with private employers adding 398,000 jobs, down from 771,000 in 2024,” said Dr. Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist. “While we’ve seen a continuous and dramatic slowdown in job creation for the past three years, wage growth has remained stable.”
“The ADP report revealed that the U.S. job market started 2026 in the same manner that it ended 2025: sluggish,” says Melissa Cohn, regional vice president of William Raveis Mortgage and a 43-year mortgage industry veteran. If there’s a silver lining, Cohn says, it’s that it increases the prospect of a rate cut ahead—which could be good news for homebuyers hoping to see mortgage rates decline. As of Feb. 4, rates are sitting at 6.2%.
“If the job market remains in low gear, then that could open the door for the Fed to cut rates earlier in the year than expected,” she says.
To see the full report, go here.
