ISM Services PMI: the services survey and its prices index

What the services survey covers

The survey asks purchasing and supply executives at services firms, in sectors from retail and health care to finance and professional services, whether activity, orders, employment and prices rose, held or fell. Like the manufacturing survey, it is a diffusion index, with 50 as the dividing line between more respondents reporting growth and more reporting decline.

The headline services PMI is an average of four indexes: business activity, new orders, employment and supplier deliveries. It measures breadth, not size.

Why the prices index gets attention

• Services inflation depends on wages and demand more than on commodity prices, and it has tended to be slower to change than goods inflation.
• The prices index reports the share of firms paying more for inputs; a rise can precede higher services prices in the CPI and PCE.
• A headline on consensus with a surprise in prices can move Treasury futures more than index futures.
• Respondent comments often explain whether price pressure comes from labor, insurance, tariffs or energy.

Why futures react

Because services dominate US activity, a surprise in business activity or new orders changes growth expectations more than the manufacturing survey does on its own. Index futures react through growth and earnings, Treasury futures through both growth and the prices index, and dollar-quoted FX futures follow the rates move. How much the market cares depends on what it is debating: slowdown fears raise the weight of activity, inflation worries raise the weight of prices.

Order flow on the third business day

At 10:00 ET the regular session is thirty minutes old and the book is deeper than in the pre-market. The release often produces a clear footprint bar with a burst of initiative volume, but the move per contract traded tends to be smaller than on an 8:30 release of similar importance. In some months the services survey lands in the same week as the jobs report and the market treats it as a preview of labor data; in others it is overshadowed.

Comparing reactions across instruments is informative. If ZN moves sharply and ES barely reacts, the market is reading the prices index; if ES and NQ move with little change in ZN, it is reading activity. Two chart panes on the same timeline make the comparison visible without switching screens.

In Senzoukria

In the News calendar, the services row carries the description “ISM survey — US business activity index.” when the name matches. The event detail's Quant mode card classifies ISM rows in the Survey family.

The Volume Profile overlay on the Session period shows whether the post-release move builds value at new prices or rotates back into the morning's value area. The chart's Relative Volume indicator puts the 9:00 CT bar's volume against the average of the preceding bars.