NFP Report 04/02/2022
NFP Description
The non-farm payroll (NFP) report is a key economic indicator for the United States. It is intended to represent the total number of paid workers in the U.S. minus farm employees, government employees, private household employees and employees of nonprofit organizations.
The release of the NFP generally occurs on the first Friday of every month at 8:30 a.m. EST.
The non-farm payroll report causes one of the consistently largest rate movements of any news announcement in the forex market. As a result, many analysts, traders, funds, investors, and speculators anticipate the NFP number and the directional movement it will cause. With so many different parties watching this report and interpreting it, even when the number comes in line with estimates, it can cause large rate swings.
The US economy added a meagre 199K jobs in the last month of 2021, well below market forecasts of 400K. Employment continued to trend up in leisure and hospitality (53K); professional and business services (43K); manufacturing (26K); construction (22K); and in transportation and warehousing (19K). Job growth averaged 537K per month in 2021 and the economy added a record 6.44 million jobs last year. Nonfarm employment has increased by 18.8 million since April 2020 but is still down by 3.6 million, or 2.3 percent, from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. The impact of the rapid spread of the omicron coronavirus variant on the labor market is still uncertain as the December report covered the first two weeks of the month only, before the worst of the spike that began heading into Christmas.
