Younger Small-Business Owners Plan to Hire as Small-Firm Jobs Fall

Small-business owners in younger generations were more than twice as likely as Baby Boomers or older owners to plan hiring over the next year, while payroll estimates showed jobs slipping at the smallest firms.

The Q3 2026 survey was conducted online in English from Aug. 4-18 and included 759 U.S. small-business owners and operators age 18 or older. It defined small businesses as firms with up to 500 employees and excluded sole proprietorships. The 46% figure combines Gen Z and Millennial respondents; it is not a Gen Z-only result.

Across all respondents, 36% planned to increase staffing over the next year, down from 44% in Q3 2025. The younger-owner group also showed stronger expectations in two other areas: 50% planned to increase investment, versus 18% of Baby Boomers or older owners, while 71% expected revenue growth, compared with 51% of the older group.

Those figures measure expectations, not completed hires or investments. The survey's adjusted credibility interval was 5.9 percentage points for all respondents; generation-specific sample sizes and intervals were not provided, so that interval does not establish the precision of the age-group comparisons.

A separate payroll-based estimate counted 12,929,100 employees at U.S. businesses with one to nine workers in Q3. That was 28,700 fewer than in Q2, a 0.22% drop and the third consecutive quarterly decline. The estimate used anonymized payroll records from a sample of 463,000 businesses with one to nine employees.

The survey includes firms with as many as 500 employees, while the payroll estimate covers only the smallest firms. The survey also measures plans for the coming year, while the payroll figure counts existing jobs. The two measures therefore do not show that younger owners have already added workers.

Across the broader U.S. labor market, nonfarm payroll employment increased by 29,000 in September, while unemployment was 4.2%; both changed little.

Justworks CEO Mike Seckler described the confidence he sees among younger owners: “Yet I’ve already proven to myself that I can thrive in this.”