What the Index Measured in July 2026
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index reached 99.80 in July 2026, up from 97.40 in June 2026, its highest level since August 2025, a figure sourced via Trading Economics’s aggregation of the official NFIB release after this research’s attempts to fetch NFIB’s own press-release pages directly returned an access error. That is a meaningful month-over-month jump, not a marginal shift, and it puts the index at its best reading in nearly a year.
The exact July 2026 reading should be re-verified against nfib.com’s own press release directly before being treated as final, since it was sourced here through a third-party aggregator rather than NFIB’s own page.
What Feeds Into the Composite Score
The index is built from roughly 620 NFIB member responses across ten seasonally-adjusted components: employment plans, capital-expenditure plans, inventory plans, economic-outlook expectations, sales-growth expectations, current inventory, job-opening availability, credit-condition expectations, expansion-timing assessment, and earnings trajectory.
Employment plans and job-opening availability are two of those ten inputs, meaning hiring intentions genuinely feed into the headline number, even though this page cannot isolate their standalone percentage contribution separately, as explained below.
How This Reading Compares to the Index’s Own History
A reading of 99.80 sits above the index’s own 1975 to 2026 average of 97.99, a modestly above-average result by the index’s own long-run standard. It remains well below the all-time high of 108.80 recorded in August 2018, and far above the record low of 80.10 recorded in April 1980, near the bottom of a deep historical recession-era trough.
Reading a single month’s score against that full historical range gives useful context a bare month-over-month comparison alone would miss, an above-average reading that is still nowhere near either historical extreme.
Why This Page Does Not Cite a Standalone Hiring-Plans Percentage
Isolating the exact numeric reading of the employment-plans or job-opening-availability component specifically, separate from the ten-part composite score, was not achievable in this research; the underlying access errors that limited a direct NFIB fetch applied to sub-component detail as much as the topline figure.
Rather than estimating or borrowing a rounded hiring-intentions number from an unconfirmed source, this page states the composite reading plainly and names hiring plans as one of its real, confirmed inputs, without inventing a standalone percentage that could not be independently verified.
A Sourcing Note Worth Repeating
Every figure above traces to Trading Economics’s aggregation of the official NFIB release, not a direct fetch of nfib.com itself, since NFIB’s own press-release pages returned an access error during this research. The index value, its methodology, and its historical range are standard, cross-confirmable figures, but the exact July 2026 reading deserves direct confirmation against NFIB’s own press release before being treated as fully final.
That caveat applies to every mention of the 99.80 figure on this page, beyond its first appearance.
Where This Fits Against Staffing’s Own 2026 Recovery Signal
Small-business optimism improving in July 2026 lines up with a compatible signal already visible in the staffing industry’s own data: ASA reported Q1 2026 staffing sales down just 4.3% sequentially, the smallest Q1 sequential decline since 2022. Neither figure alone proves the other, but both point the same direction, toward a small-business and staffing environment stabilizing in 2026 rather than continuing to deteriorate.
Human + AI SDRs can help a staffing firm act on exactly that kind of stabilizing signal, keeping meetings landing with small-business hiring managers as their own optimism, and their own hiring plans, start to firm back up.
The Numbers
NFIB Small Business Optimism Index: 99.80 in July 2026, up from 97.40 in June 2026.
That is the index’s highest level since August 2025.
The index is built from roughly 620 NFIB member responses across ten seasonally-adjusted components.
Historical range: all-time high of 108.80 in August 2018; record low of 80.10 in April 1980; 1975 to 2026 average of 97.99.
ASA: Q1 2026 staffing sales fell 4.3% sequentially, the smallest Q1 sequential decline since 2022.
American Staffing Association, Seasonal Declines Narrow in First Quarter of 2026
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, data via Trading Economics aggregation of the official NFIB release
- American Staffing Association, “Seasonal Declines Narrow in First Quarter of 2026”