Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP)

NFP measures the net change in the number of paid US workers during the prior month, excluding farm work, government roles, and a few other categories -- released the first Friday of most months. It's watched so intensely because it's timely, broad, and directly informs what the Federal Reserve is likely to do next, and because the US dollar sits on one side of the vast majority of global FX trades.

The same report includes the unemployment rate and average hourly earnings (wage growth). Wage growth gets special attention because rising wages can themselves fuel inflation -- a strong headline payrolls number alongside soft wage growth is a genuinely different signal than the reverse, and the market will often weight whichever one has more inflation implications more heavily.

Suppose NFP is expected at +180K jobs and comes in at +150K -- a miss -- but average hourly earnings beat forecast, rising 0.4% MoM against an expected 0.2%. A pure headline read would call this dollar-negative (fewer jobs than hoped), but the hot wage number can pull the reaction the other way, since it raises inflation concern even with softer job creation. NFP reactions are rarely about the headline number alone.