“It was a seismic shift in small business owners’ perception or how they feel about small business conditions moving forward into 2025,” NFIB Executive Director of Research Holly Wade said.
Small business owners are confident the 2017 tax cuts won’t be allowed to lapse this year, now that Trump will be back in office.
And Wade said small business owners expect a “lessening (of) the regulatory threat that they've endured.”
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index rose by 3.4 points in December to 105.1. That’s the second consecutive month above the five-decade average of 98.
A month earlier, the index rose by eight points to 101.7. Wade said that was the largest one-month increase in decades for their optimism index.
Wade said the newly released December optimism index built off the “November historic surge.”
The NFIB’s optimism index is based on surveys from small companies across a broad scope of industries. The NFIB has collected small business economic trends data with quarterly surveys since 1973 and monthly surveys since 1986.
An NFIB index that measures uncertainty dropped again in December, which is the direction they want to see in that index.
