Glossary
NFP (non-farm payrolls)
The monthly change in US non-farm payroll jobs from the BLS Employment Situation report, released at 8:30 New York time, most often on the first Friday.
NFP (non-farm payrolls) is the monthly change in the number of paid jobs in the US outside farming, published in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Situation report. It comes from the establishment survey of about 119,000 businesses and government agencies. The same report includes the unemployment rate from the household survey and revisions to the two previous months. It is released at 8:30 New York time, most often on the first Friday of the month.
Example
The September 2026 report came out on Friday, 2 October 2026. Payrolls rose by 29,000 and the unemployment rate was 4.2%. The same release revised August down by 29,000, from +162,000 to +133,000. A revision can be as large as the headline change itself.
Why it matters
NFP is one of the largest scheduled sources of volatility in gold, US indices and the dollar. In our lab, NFP was one of three releases, with FOMC and CPI, after which gold's direction in the first 30 minutes tended to continue.