If it seems that the BLS CES nonfarm payroll employment series has looked a bit more variable than usual, you might not be imagining it (although one would be very hard pressed to show it’s a statistically significant difference). To see this, compare against the ADP measure.

Figure 1: Official BLS private nonfarm payroll series (blue), ADP series (red), QCEW series, seasonally adjusted by author using X-13 (in logs) (green), all in log differences from last benchmark 2025M03 (marked in dashed light blue line). Light blue shading denotes 2026 observations.  Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, BLS, and author’s calculations.

One might think this increased variability — not evidenced in the ADP series — is due to either (1) differing coverage of, for instance, the nurses strike in February, or (2) use of a new birth-death model. On the first point, the Kaiser nurse’s strike should have been covered by ADP as well as by BLS (as far as I can tell). On the second point, the new birth-death model was retroactively applied to the post-benchmark data, with application to preliminary release starting with January 2026 data. Hence, it’s not clear that this is the exact poinnt.

For a more agnostic assessment, see J.Coronado.