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

Base pay rose 3.2%; gross pay was up 4.7%

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.

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.

“Pay can tell us a lot about today’s choppy hiring. To understand hiring patterns, you have to look deeply into where pay growth is accelerating, where it’s slowing, and for whom,” said Dr. Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP.

“Once predictable wage growth has been overtaken by complexities of demographic change, persistent inflation, and AI’s effects on jobs,” Richardson said. “Our new Pay Insights report, with its enhanced data, can more fully reveal the dynamics of today’s labor market.”