The anticipated US Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report for February 2024, set to be released on 02 April 2024, is expected to surpass the consensus forecasts. Job openings are expected to be between 8.8 and 9.0 million, ahead of the consensus expectation of 8.8 million, while non-farm payroll (NFP) data for March 2024 is expected to be between 240,000 and 260,000, ahead of the consensus expectation of 200,000, signaling a buoyant US labor market, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

GlobalData’s US Active Jobs index, derived from high frequency company job postings dataset, which has a 90+% correlation with JOLTS data and available in near real-time, is well suited to detect labor market trends in real-time.

Job openings showed healthy growth in February 2024, growing 19% month-on-month, with a majority of growth coming from heavyweight sectors like pharma, retail, automotive, banking, and technology.

Adarsh Jain, CFA, Director of Financial Markets at GlobalData, comments: “Job growth coming from varied sectors is a sign of a healthy underlying jobs market and suggests it will remain strong in the near term, despite challenges of technologies like AI making certain job types redundant.”

Jain adds: “For NFP, we focus on job closures, as they generally signify headcount additions to companies’ payrolls. For March 2024, job closures grew 25%, the third fastest growth rate in last three years, led by the pharma, retail, automotive, and banking sectors.”

NFP predictions using GlobalData’s jobs dataset have proven to be invaluable, as they have been better than consensus predictions 67% of the time over the past year.

Jain concludes: “US jobs continued strength will likely temper rate cut expectations. We think the evolution of the jobs data needs to be monitored closely over the next couple few months to get a better sense of the rate cuts trajectory at the Fed for 2024.”