Nonfarm payrolls
Nonfarm payrolls — the monthly establishment-survey count of US jobs — is the headline release of the US data calendar. Published by the BLS on the first Friday of each month, it's the closest thing to a real-time employment census and one of the NBER's key recession-dating inputs.
Why it moves markets and datings
Payrolls captures breadth — losses across sectors, hours worked, wages — not just the count. The NBER committee explicitly weights employment heavily; sustained negative payrolls have coincided with every dated recession. Revisions matter enormously: benchmark revisions have rewritten entire year's worth of job growth.
The noise caveat
The survey has a ±100k margin of error around the headline and faces two revisions plus annual benchmark restating — the July and August prints you see are drafts, not final answers. On this site, payrolls inform context rather than driving a dedicated signal: labor-market trend is read through claims, unemployment rates, and temp help, which are less revision-prone.