Glossary
Nonfarm payrolls
The monthly BLS count of US jobs added or lost outside farming, a headline figure in the first-Friday jobs report.
Nonfarm payrolls is the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly estimate of the number of paid jobs in the economy outside farming, private households and a few other categories. The headline is the change from the prior month, as in "the economy added 150,000 jobs." Released in the Employment Situation report, usually on the first Friday of the month at 8:30 a.m. ET, it is one of the most market-moving data points in the world, because it shapes expectations for Federal Reserve policy.
How it is measured
The figure comes from the Current Employment Statistics survey, a survey of employers covering a large sample of businesses and government agencies. It counts jobs, not people, so someone with two part-time jobs is counted twice. The same report includes average hourly earnings and the average workweek. The unemployment rate in the same release comes from a different source, a survey of households, which is why the two can occasionally point in different directions.
Revisions
Each month's estimate is revised twice in the following two reports as more employer responses arrive. Once a year, the whole series is benchmarked to near-complete counts from state unemployment-insurance tax records, and that revision can move the level of employment by hundreds of thousands of jobs.
How markets read it
A number well above forecasts can push Treasury yields up, as investors expect tighter policy; a weak number can do the opposite. Because single months are noisy, analysts focus on the three-month average, the revisions and wage growth. Big swings in government hiring, strikes and severe weather can distort a single month.