[analyte123]

The ADP payroll report is noise. It is based on the payroll data from ADP only. The assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy and that there is no regional, sector, or company stage bias to their customers. A firm with ADP laying employees off and 3 new firms with the same number of employees being founded and using a different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.

[chc4]

ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America. That is both a large sample size, and probably broadly representative of the economy. There will of course be some business segments that are over or underrepresented but that is different than disregarding the entire report as noise.

[WillPostForFood]

ADP reported a meager 29,000 increase in new jobs, but the BLS showed a much larger 139,000 gain. April also showed a similarly wide gap between the two reports.

Through the first five months of 2025, the difference between the two reports has averaged a whopping 63,000 a month.

source: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20250702107/be-...

ADP has always been out of sync with BLS numbers. Here is an article in the Atlantic all the way back in 2011 talking about it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/chart-o...

[shkkmo]

> That is both a large sample size,

It doesn't matter how large your sample size is if your sampling method is biased. This could be measuring market share gain/loss in different segments of a steady employment environment.

> disregarding the entire report as noise

Studies with bad / non public sampling methods should be, at a minimum, treated with great skepticism. Why would that not apply here?

[eastbound]

ADP is predominant in large companies and has little hold in startups. It skews the stats.

[chasd00]

> ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America

that's less than 20%. If you had 10 people to interview and interviewed 2 of them i wouldn't say you interviewed a representative sample of the 10.

[jjk166]

Noise is the absence of a signal. A biased signal is fine, just account for the bias.

ADP is huge and covers a broad range of sectors. It would be a very interesting result (and a very extraordinary claim) if the employment data from non-ADP companies went in the opposite direction of ADP. I certainly see no evidence that firms underrepresented in ADP's data are hiring prodigiously.

[JumpCrisscross]

> assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy

No such assumption is made except by an errant reading of the report. The ADP report [1] can be used to predict BLS numbers, but it’s also independently useful. The reason the headline is 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost is because 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost, ADP can directly count that.

[1] https://adpemploymentreport.com/

[jeffbee]

There have been many instances of ADP and BLS job reports being out of step, which can be expected because of their differing methodologies. On the other hand, nobody with a brain can take BLS surveys at face value under these circumstances.

[csomar]

It depends on how randomly representative it is. If it is close to random, then it's better than most poll data.