What Is Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP)

What the report is

The US jobs report is called non-farm payrolls after the thing it counts. It counts the jobs added or lost in the month across the country, leaving out farms and a few other groups, and it is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics once a month. It lands usually on the first Friday at 8:30 in New York, which is 15:30 on the feed's clock, and it arrives with two companions, the unemployment rate and average hourly earnings. On 7 August 2026 the minute moved the euro against the dollar 42.3 pips, where a pip is the fourth decimal place of the price; on 5 June 2026, 16.9. One number, published to the second, read by the central bank and by everyone at once, is why the minute moves as much as it does.

A rack of time cards

Picture a rack of time cards at a factory gate, the kind every worker punches on the way in. Forty-eight slots, forty-one with a card in them; the gold cards are this month's new hires and the empty slots are the leavers. Payrolls is that headcount, taken across the whole country every month by asking employers how many cards are in their racks. The number the market waits for is the change from last month to this: not how many slots, but how many more or fewer cards, which is why a number in the tens of thousands can move the world's most traded currency in five minutes.

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