BofA Merrill expecting NFP at 170K and possible upward revisions

We look for nonfarm payroll growth of 170,000 in October, in line with the recent 6- month trend and up from 156,000 in September. We expect private payroll growth to have constituted 165,000 of this gain with a modest 5,000 gain in government payrolls. Our equity analysts have only seen mixed signals related to holiday hiring so far, but there have been some news reports of stronger seasonal hiring, presenting upside risk to our forecast.

The underlying rate of job growth should remain robust based on our forecast for October and especially given the possibility of an upward revision to September jobs. As we argued in Nonfarm payrolls myths and realities, there tends to be a pattern of upward revisions to September in the order of about 30,000 jobs. We expect the unemployment rate to remain unchanged at 5.0% with the labor force participation rate holding at 62.9%.

The labor force participation rate will be an important indicator to watch given the 0.1pp increase last month. We expect a trend-like 0.2% mom gain in average hourly earnings, leaving the year-over-year rate to fall to 2.5% from 2.6%, and we think average weekly hours will remain unchanged at 34.4.