Non-Farm Payrolls
Non-farm payrolls (NFP) is the monthly count of net new jobs added to the U.S. economy excluding agricultural workers, private household employees, and non-profit organization employees, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Employment Situation Summary and widely regarded as the single most market-moving U.S. economic data release.
Released on the first Friday of each month, the Employment Situation Summary (colloquially 'the jobs report') is one of the most anticipated events on the economic calendar. The headline NFP number measures the net change in employment across the nonfarm payroll sector — roughly 80% of U.S. workers — and is derived from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey of approximately 119,000 businesses and government agencies covering about 629,000 individual work sites.
The consensus estimate for NFP is assembled by financial data vendors each month based on surveys of economists, and the deviation of the actual print from the consensus ('the beat or miss') often drives immediate and sharp moves in equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities. A much stronger-than-expected number can push bond yields higher (as it signals inflationary pressure and a hawkish Fed), while simultaneously sending stocks lower — or higher, depending on whether the market is in 'good news is good news' or 'good news is bad news' mode relative to Fed policy expectations.
The same report also contains the unemployment rate (U-3), average hourly earnings (AHE), average weekly hours, and the labor force participation rate — each providing distinct insights into labor market conditions. Of these, average hourly earnings is arguably the second most important figure after NFP itself, because wage growth feeds directly into the Fed's inflation calculus.
Historic NFP prints include April 2020 (minus 20.5 million jobs — the largest single-month job loss ever recorded, driven by COVID-19 lockdowns), May 2020 (plus 2.5 million, surprising virtually everyone who had forecast further losses), and the sustained 2021–2022 recovery that averaged over 400,000 jobs per month for more than a year. Monthly revisions to prior months' data often attract nearly as much attention as the new data point, as they can materially change the trend picture.