Private sector employment increased by 155,000 jobs in March and annual pay was up 4.6% year-over-year, according to the March ADP National Employment Report produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

The ADP National Employment Report is an independent measure and high-frequency view of the private-sector labor market based on actual, anonymized payroll data of more than 25 million U.S. employees. The jobs report and pay insights use ADP’s fine-grained anonymized and aggregated payroll data to provide a representative picture of the private-sector labor market. The report details the current month’s total private employment change, and weekly job data from the previous month. Because the underlying ADP payroll databases are continuously updated, the report provides a high-frequency, near real-time measure of U.S. employment. This measure reflects the number of employees on ADP client payrolls (Payroll Employment) to provide a richer understanding of the labor market. As of January 2025, ADP’s Pay Insights measure captures nearly 14.8 million individual pay change observations each month, up from nearly 10 million when it launched.

“Despite policy uncertainty and downbeat consumers, the bottom line is this: The March topline number was a good one for the economy and employers of all sizes, if not necessarily all sectors,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist, ADP.