The pace of hiring by the US private sector edged upwards in March, with employers adding more than a quarter of a million jobs, according to the payrolls firm ADP.
The survey, covering nearly 24 million workers, showed that small, medium and large businesses added 263,000 new jobs, up 7.3 percent from February’s 245,000, which was revised downward from a six-year high.
The result showed the tight US labor market had started off the first quarter of 2017 in good shape and handily surpassed analyst expectations, which had called for an increase of only 175,000 net new positions.
The figures are published in advance of Friday’s release of closely watched Labor Department numbers and suggested they could have a strong showing as well.
“The gains are broad-based but most notable in the goods producing side of the economy including construction, manufacturing and mining,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, which jointly produces the ADP report, said in a statement.
While the goods-producing segment may have grown faster, the lion’s share of the new jobs were in the larger service-providing sector, which accounted for 69 percent of the net new positions.
Robust job creation since mid-2016 has helped spur the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark interest rate twice since December after a decade of near-zero rates.
Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics said that in light of the ADP figures he estimated that Friday’s Labor Department figures would show a total of 220,000 net new jobs created in March.
“If that’s right, the pressure for the Fed to hike again in June — or base case — will rise,” he wrote in a note to clients.
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