ADP Reports 86,000 U.S. Private Job Gain as Base Pay Growth Holds Steady

ADP Research reported on November 4, 2026, that U.S. private-sector employment increased by 86,000 jobs in October, matching September’s downwardly revised gain as service providers drove nearly all hiring. Its October National Employment Report, produced with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, also showed steady base-pay growth alongside stronger growth in gross pay.

September’s estimate was reduced from 90,000 to 86,000. ADP described hiring as showing solid growth for a second month, but the composition was uneven: service-providing employers added 82,000 jobs, while goods-producing employers added 4,000.

Services Offset Continued Industry Losses

Trade, transportation and utilities led with 39,000 new jobs, followed by education and health services at 28,000. Leisure and hospitality added 19,000 and financial activities 15,000. Construction added 13,000, but goods-producing employment was held back by losses of 8,000 in natural resources and mining and 1,000 in manufacturing.

Professional and business services shed 27,000 jobs, its third consecutive monthly decline, while information lost 2,000. Those decreases show that October’s net gain did not reflect across-the-board hiring even though every broad establishment-size category expanded. Small establishments added 28,000 jobs, medium-sized establishments 33,000 and large establishments 24,000.

The geographic split was also uneven. The South added 47,000 jobs and the West 28,000, compared with 9,000 in the Midwest and 3,000 in the Northeast.

Gross Pay Outpaced Regular Pay for Job-Changers

The accompanying Pay Insights report put median year-over-year base-pay growth at 3.2% for all workers, 3.0% for job-stayers and 4.8% for job-changers. Each rate was unchanged from the preceding month.

Median gross-pay growth was higher, at 4.7% for all workers, 4.4% for job-stayers and 7.6% for job-changers. ADP’s technical notes define base pay as a job’s regular pay rate, excluding overtime, tips, bonuses and commissions. Gross pay includes those items as well as cash benefits. Base pay tracks structural wage trends, while gross pay captures total compensation generated by labor-market activity.

ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said the data suggested job-changers were attracted by bonuses, overtime and more hours in addition to higher base pay. “Taken together, earnings growth for these workers hit its fastest pace since March 2024,” she said.

The two pay measures do not cover identical employer samples: the base-pay sample is built on organizations with 50 or more employees, while the gross-pay sample includes organizations of all sizes.

Payroll Records Define the Report’s Scope

The employment report draws on aggregated, anonymized payroll data covering more than 26 million U.S. employees across more than half a million companies. Its monthly employment snapshot uses the week containing the 12th day of the month, while the pay data cover the entire month. Pay Insights compares individual workers’ pay over 12-month intervals, generating more than 14.7 million year-over-year observations each month.

Unlike a conventional survey, the report uses actual payroll records and is explicitly not intended to forecast the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly nonfarm payroll report.

That scope leaves a clear distinction in October’s results. ADP recorded another month of job creation, but the gains were concentrated in services and regular pay growth did not accelerate. The stronger gross-pay reading among people changing employers adds information about bonuses, overtime and hours; it is not, by itself, evidence of a broad-based rise in underlying wage growth.