About this indicator
About
Nonfarm payrolls (NFP) is the count of paid workers on U.S. business payrolls, excluding farm workers, the self-employed, military personnel, and federal civilian agency employees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the number on the first Friday of each month as part of the Employment Situation report, drawn from the Current Employment Statistics survey of about 122,000 businesses and government agencies covering 666,000 individual worksites.
Why it matters
NFP is the highest-volatility scheduled release in U.S. macro. A miss of 50,000 jobs is large enough to move the S&P 500 by half a percent in the first minute and the 10-year Treasury yield by 5-8 basis points. Beyond the headline count, the report carries average hourly earnings, average weekly hours, and the household-survey unemployment rate — three more market-moving prints in the same release window.
How it's computed
BLS counts payrolls by surveying businesses, not households. A worker holding two jobs counts twice. The survey reference period is the pay period containing the 12th of the month. The initial print is revised in each of the next two months as more responses come in, and the entire series gets a benchmark revision each February against the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
Pitfalls
Initial prints get revised. The two-month revision footnote at the bottom of every NFP table sometimes flips the cycle read: a strong first print plus a 100,000-job downward revision is a different story than the headline suggests. The household survey (different sample, different methodology) often disagrees with the establishment survey in any given month; both telling the same story is the stronger signal.