Nonfarm payrolls
The monthly count of jobs added or lost across most US employers, excluding farm workers, from the Labor Department's jobs report.
Nonfarm payrolls measure the change in the number of paid US employees outside farming, private households and a few other categories, based on a survey of employers. It is released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the monthly employment report, usually on the first Friday of the month, alongside the unemployment rate and wage growth. Revisions to the prior two months are common.
On our site, the payroll change is shown with the consensus and the revisions. Read the revisions and the three-month average, since a single month can be noisy.
Traders care because the jobs report is among the most market-moving data points. A strong print can raise yields and the dollar, and a weak one can revive rate-cut expectations.
Worked example (illustrative numbers, not real data): consensus is 150,000 jobs, the print is 90,000, and the prior two months are revised down by a combined 60,000. A soft print with downward revisions reads as a broad slowdown, not a single weak month.