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Non-Farm Payrolls

Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) is the headline figure of the U.S. Employment Situation report, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on the first Friday of each month. It measures the net change in employed workers across the prior month, excluding farm workers, private household employees, non-profit employees, and active-duty military — a scope covering roughly 80% of GDP-producing workforce. NFP is the single largest scheduled volatility event for rates, FX, and equity index futures.

HOW IT WORKS

NFP is derived from the establishment survey, which samples approximately 119,000 businesses and 629,000 worksites. The headline figure is simply total non-farm employment this month minus total non-farm employment last month. The BLS counts jobs, not people, so a worker holding two jobs appears twice. Data are seasonally adjusted, and a birth-death model estimates jobs from new businesses not yet captured by the survey. Initial prints carry a 90% confidence interval of roughly ±130,000 jobs, and revisions to the prior two months are released alongside each new report, often swinging the picture by 50,000 or more jobs. The unemployment rate is published in the same release but comes from a separate household survey of ~60,000 households, which counts people rather than positions — occasionally producing a conflicting read within the same report.

IN TAPEBOARD

Tapeboard surfaces the NFP release time on the macro calendar with countdown and consensus estimate so traders can manage positioning ahead of 8:30 a.m. Eastern. After the print, the terminal displays the headline surprise versus consensus alongside real-time moves in the 2-year Treasury yield, the dollar index, and S&P 500 futures — the instruments most sensitive to the number. Fed funds futures probabilities update automatically, letting traders see how the market is repricing the rate path within seconds of the release. NFP Fridays also flag elevated implied volatility in 0-DTE options, which Tapeboard highlights in the options flow view.

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