Private Employers Added 90,000 Jobs in September, ADP Says
U.S. private employers added 90,000 jobs in September 2026, according to the ADP National Employment Report published Sept. 30. ADP The estimate covers private payrolls only, meaning business jobs and not government jobs. It was released two days before the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report for the same month, the government's official jobs count.
That September figure compares with 38,000 jobs ADP reported for August. ADP
Pay for stayers and switchers
Pay moved differently by mobility and by measure. Base pay, the underlying wage rate, rose 4.8% from a year earlier for job-changers and 3.0% for job-stayers. Gross pay, which adds hours, overtime, bonuses and commissions to that base rate, rose 7.3% for job-changers. The gap between base and gross leaves room for hours, overtime, bonuses and commissions to explain part of the extra gain from switching.
For August, ADP reported gross pay up 7.3% from a year earlier for changers and up 4.4% for stayers. The changer gross-pay rate was therefore flat at 7.3% from August to September. The September release did not repeat the stayer gross-pay figure on the same basis, while it added the 4.8% and 3.0% base-pay pair.
How this fits Friday's official report
Consensus for the BLS report was for U.S. nonfarm payrolls, the headline count of jobs outside farming, to rise by 90,000 in September 2026, with the unemployment rate expected to hold steady. Reuters ADP is not the BLS payroll count. Traders use it as a directional check ahead of nonfarm payrolls, average hourly earnings and hours.
Earlier wage readings frame those ADP pay numbers. U.S. wages were up 3.8% from a year earlier in the December report covered Jan. 9, 2026, after a 3.6% rise previously. Average hourly earnings, the BLS measure of pay per hour, were forecast to rise 3.5% from a year earlier in June 2026. Further back, average hourly earnings rose 0.4% in September 2024 after a 0.5% gain in August 2024.
From April coverage, the average workweek was 34.3 hours, up from 34.2 hours, while the share of industries adding jobs was 53.8%, down from 56.8% in March. Reuters MarketWatch has reported that raises from switching jobs are smaller than they used to be, but switching still brings a larger bump. MarketWatch
The broader context here is a labor market cooling more in hiring numbers than in pay. August had pointed to a sharp slowdown in hiring. September steadies the series without returning to high-momentum growth. Ninety thousand is expansion, but sub-trend expansion. Longer hours with narrower hiring is a familiar late-cycle mix, with employers getting more from existing staff while fewer sectors expand. That fits a 4.8% versus 3.0% spread where a switching premium persists but is thinner than the post-reopening spike.
In my view, the base-pay versus gross-pay split deserves more weight than the headline jump from August. Stayer base pay at 3.0%, below those BLS year-over-year rates, points to contained underlying wage pressure. Changer gross pay at 7.3% still clears well above that anchor, and the flat 7.3% across August and September suggests the outside offer stopped weakening. For unit labor costs, or cost per unit of output, the mix matters. If gains sit with movers and variable pay tied to hours and output, they tend to persist less than if stayer base rates were re-accelerating.
Looking at what this means going into the BLS data, the risk runs both ways around a soft consensus. A 90,000 nonfarm forecast with steady unemployment leaves little buffer for revisions, hours and the gap between the household and employer surveys. ADP's history on breadth and hours argues for watching diffusion and the workweek alongside average hourly earnings. A headline in line with muted hours and soft hiring breadth reads differently than the same headline with hours firming.
