ADP National Employment Report: Private-Sector Employment Increased by 38,000 Jobs in August

Private-sector employment increased by 38,000 jobs in August, according to the ADP National Employment Report® produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab ("Stanford Lab").

For all private-sector workers in the United States, base pay rose 3.2% and gross pay was up 4.7% year over year, according to ADP Pay Insights.

ADP Pay Insights now offers deeper analytics, expanded geographic data reporting across 56 metropolitan areas and an interactive website platform to compare various datasets. Key enhancements to the monthly report include base pay growth and gross pay growth across geography, worker mobility, demographics, sector, employer size, and pay quartile.

Base pay for job-stayers rose 3.0% year-over-year; base pay for job-changers increased 4.7%. Gross pay for job-stayers rose 4.4% year-over year; gross pay for job-changers increased 7.3%.

Beginning with today's release of the August 2026 data, ADP Pay Insights offers deeper analytics, expanded geographic data, and an interactive data platform . Key enhancements to the monthly report include tracking of the year-over-year change in base pay drawn from contracted pay rates in addition to the reported change in gross pay. Gross pay is drawn from base pay plus bonuses, commissions, tips, and other earnings.

ADP Pay Insights also now reports pay trends for all workers, job-stayers and job-changers combined. Data on base and gross pay is available for 56 U.S. metropolitan areas. Base and gross pay data also is available by worker mobility, demographics, sector, employer size, and pay quartile.

Base and gross pay each are valuable indicators of labor-market conditions. Base pay changes tend to be long-lasting, and any change in this structural metric can send a signal on labor-market tightness or inflationary pressure. Gross pay measures total compensation generated by labor-market activity, data that can be used to assess income growth and consumer spending power. Changes in gross pay can tell us how employers are responding to atypical economic conditions.

The ADP National Employment 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. ADP Pay Insights uses payroll transaction data to compare the wage growth of individual workers over 12-month intervals, resulting in more than 14.7 million year-over-year pay-change observations each month. Together, these reports use ADP's finely-grained data to provide a representative and high-frequency picture of the private-sector labor market.

August 2026 Report Highlights

Private employers added 38,000 jobs in August

Private employers posted their slowest pace of job creation since January. Manufacturing, professional services, and information shed jobs. Education and health care, construction, and leisure and hospitality all showed solid hiring.

Change in U.S. Private Employment : 38,000

Change by Sector - Goods-producing: -10,000

Natural resources and mining -5,000

Construction 12,000

Manufacturing -17,000

• Service-providing: 48,000

Trade, transportation, and utilities -5,000

Information -4,000

Financial activities 6,000

Professional and business services -16,000...