The white-collar jobs wipeout is getting worse

Discussions of headline numbers and breathless reporting on "job gains" are belying a stark trend in white-collar employment, as evidenced by Wednesday morning's ADP report.

The topline number — 63,000 private-sector payroll jobs added in February, for the best showing since July 2025 — appears, at first, to be good news.

But glancing even just a few lines down the report changes the story and brings something alarming into view, with the ADP table showing that professional and business services shed 30,000 jobs last month. This is the category encompassing lawyers, consultants, accountants, marketers, and administrative positions — a broad swathe of the white-collar knowledge economy, at least within this type of reporting.

The headline number appears positive only because education and health services added 58,000 positions, a category driven by health care hiring that is only distantly related to trends in more elastic sectors and that, in large part, reflects growing health care demand caused by an aging population. Construction also added 19,000 jobs, helping obscure losses in other areas; experts say the growth of data centers is driving the mini-boom in the sector even as AI buildout spending may be a negative indicator for white-collar demand.

What's more, the same report reveals that January's already-weak job numbers have been revised from 22,000 down to 11,000. This means ADP's job numbers are worse than initial reporting has portrayed in recent times, and it roughly follows trends of downward revision in government statistics over the past year.

ADP's own chief economist pointed out the worrying details emerging just below the headline numbers. "We've seen an increase in hiring and pay gains remain solid, especially for job-stayers," said Dr. Nela Richardson, in the release. "But with hiring concentrated in only a few sectors, our data shows no widespread pay benefit from changing jobs. In fact, the pay premium for switching employers hit a record low in February."

That last detail is worth lingering over. The reward for job-changers — historically one of the labor market's most reliable signals of worker leverage — has now hit a record low. This indicates that workers are not just losing jobs in professional services, but that the ones who do move jobs are finding they can no longer capture a large premium for doing so.