US private employers added 122,000 jobs in May, a modestly softer gain than April but still enough to keep the labor market moving into the summer hiring season. The increase came in close to Wall Street expectations and extended a stretch of steady, if uneven, hiring.
The figure matters now because traders and economists are watching every fresh labor print ahead of the Labor Department’s official jobs report on Friday. The ADP reading came after economists surveyed by had looked for a gain of 120,000 roles, while April’s revised total stood at 105,000. That put May’s result squarely in the zone of continued expansion, not contraction.
Growth was not narrow. Education and health services led the month, and eight of the 10 supersectors ADP tracks posted gains. Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist, said hiring was more broad-based in May than it has been in the last few years and that the labor market continued to show sustained momentum heading into the summer. Small businesses were part of that story: companies with fewer than 19 employees added about 49,000 jobs, giving the month a lift from the bottom of the employer size scale.
Richardson also pointed to one detail that tempers the otherwise solid report. Pay for job stayers rose 4.4% from a year earlier, while pay for job changers slowed to 6.5% in annual gains. The part-time share was 42% in May. In other words, hiring remained healthy, but the quality and mix of those jobs still carried some unevenness, even as broad-based gains spread across much of the private sector.
That friction showed up in the government’s labor turnover report on Tuesday, which found job openings surged in April to their highest level since May 2024 and the ratio of vacancies to unemployed workers improved to its best level since the beginning of last year. But the same report showed hiring slid and the quits rate decreased slightly, a combination that suggests companies were looking harder for workers even as actual movement in the labor market stayed restrained. Matthew Martin said the labor market remained mostly stable, with neither employees nor employers rushing to make moves.
The next test comes Friday, when the Labor Department publishes the official May jobs report and the unemployment rate. For now, the ADP numbers suggest the labor market was still expanding in May, but the official data will show whether that momentum held when the government took its own count.
