The release that moves the market most · published the first Friday of the month.
The short answer
- What is Nonfarm Payroll (Nonfarm Payroll)?
- Nonfarm Payroll: net jobs added each month outside agriculture.
- When does Nonfarm Payroll get it wrong?
- Revised twice, often by a lot. You can see it on market data now in the "Macro map". Open the macro map →
Indicator limit
Revised twice, often by a lot. The first number is not final.
Read it with
Unemployment rate: the same report's jobless figure from a different survey, so when the two agree the signal is stronger than either alone.
Answers: how is the economy doing?
What it measures
Nonfarm payrolls count the net jobs added or lost in the US economy during the month, excluding farm work, the self-employed and the military. It comes out on the first Friday of each month at 8:30 a.m. New York time, and it is the most violent five minutes on the monthly calendar.
Why it excludes agriculture
Farm hiring is violently seasonal and has nothing to do with the economic cycle. A harvest employs hundreds of thousands and then lets them go because the season ended, not because demand fell. Leaving it out keeps the cyclical signal and removes huge seasonal noise.
Three numbers in one report
The headline number is not alone. It comes with the unemployment rate and average hourly earnings. The latter can matter most to markets because it ties the labor market straight to inflation: faster wage growth means inflation pressure that keeps rates high. Revisions to the prior two months sometimes change the picture more than the new number.
Professional reading
Professionals do not read the number alone. They read the three-month average, because monthly volatility is high and revisions are large. A big number with a sharp downward revision to the prior two months can be negative on net.
Hypothetical example
A report shows 200,000 jobs (above forecast), but average earnings slow and revisions to the prior two months subtract 80,000. The headline is strong and the substance is weak. The market jumps in the first second and then reverses once the details are read. It is a repeating pattern, familiar to anyone who does not trade headlines.
Read it with
Read it with the unemployment rate released alongside it. Add the consumer price index, since the Fed weighs jobs and inflation together, and implied volatility, which swells before the release and collapses after.
Where to see it on the platform
The macro calendar lists it with its date and forecast, and the macro dashboard feeds it into the regime reading and recession risk.
