Washington, May 6 (IANS): Private companies in the US added 742,000 jobs in April, indicating continued labour market recovery, payroll data company Automatic Data Processing (ADP) reported.

"The labour market continues an upward trend of acceleration and growth, posting the strongest reading since September 2020," Xinhua news agency quoted Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, as saying on Wednesday.

Richardson noted that service providers have the most to gain as the economy reopens, recovers and resumes normal activities and are leading job growth in April.

The service-providing sectors added 636,000 jobs in the month, according to the report, which was produced by the ADP Research Institute in collaboration with Moody's Analytics.

Leisure and hospitality sectors added 237,000 jobs, trade, transportation and utilities sectors added 155,000, while professional and business services added 104,000.

Information sector, however, lost 3,000 jobs in the month.

Large firms and medium-sized businesses hired 277,000 and 230,000 workers respectively, while small companies added 235,000 employees, the ADP report showed, indicating a balanced recovery across different company sizes.

"While payrolls are still more than 8 million jobs short of pre-Covid levels, job gains have totaled 1.3 million in the last two months after adding only about 1 million jobs over the course of the previous five months," Richardson said.

Private companies slashed roughly 20 million jobs in March and April last year amid shutdowns.

Amid reopening efforts, the private sector saw a revised job gain of over 3 million in May, followed by a revised growth of over 4 million in June.

After that, however, job growth has been slowing down.

In December 2020, the trend was even reversed, with private companies shedding a revised 75,000 jobs amid Covid spikes.

The ADP report came two days before the crucial monthly employment report released by the Department of Labour's Bureau of Labor Statistics, which will include employment data from both the private sector and the government.