(TNND) — Consumer confidence took a slight hit this month, with views of the labor market eroding.

The Conference Board published its Consumer Confidence Index for January, which registered a 104.1 reading.

The index fell over five points from December, which itself fell several points from November.

The Conference Board is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank and business membership organization that has been measuring consumer confidence since 1967.

The index reading, which currently sits at 104.1, was above 100 from the summer of 2016 until the spring of 2020.

The index, which got as high as 137.9 in the last decade, got as low as around 86 early in the pandemic.

The index has been in a relatively stable, narrow range since 2022.

The Conference Board Senior Economist Stephanie Guichard said that’s mostly good.

The index is above the long-term average, she said.

And Americans have proven they’re willing to spend at this level of consumer confidence.

There’s no reason to expect consumers to pull back their spending this year, Guichard said.

So, why did consumer optimism decline this month?

“It's really a labor market story, if you look at the details of the components and how they have been moving,” Guichard said.

A third of consumers said jobs were “plentiful,” down from 37.1% in December.

And 16.8% of consumers said jobs were “hard to get,” up from 14.9% the month before.

Consumers’ assessments of the labor market outlook remained pessimistic, according to The Conference Board.

A fifth of people anticipated fewer jobs in the coming months, unchanged from December.

Another long-running consumer sentiment survey, one from the University of Michigan, found job concerns on the rise.

The Michigan survey for January found about 47% of consumers expect unemployment to rise in the year ahead, the highest since the pandemic recession.

The unemployment rate is currently 4.1%, which Guichard said was “historically ... pretty good.”

Guichard said their surveys found folks are more pessimistic about the future than the present.

That future pessimism is rooted in job concerns, as well.

“And it's most likely because they know that good things don't last forever, so they know that this relatively strong labor market may not last,” she said.

Consumers are still optimistic about their income, Guichard said.

And Americans are even more optimistic about their families’ financial situation, she said.

People don’t appear to be worried they’ll lose their job even if the labor market softens.

“Because if it was the case, they would be much less optimistic about their financial situation,” Guichard said.

Small business owners have been feeling pretty good since Donald Trump and congressional Republicans won big on Election Day.

The National Federation of Independent Business released a report this month showing the growing positivity, with the new NFIB Small Business Optimism Index registering its highest reading in over six years.

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 previously told The National News Desk.

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.”

Unlike NFIB, The Conference Board didn’t find much of an impact from the election in its consumer confidence surveys.

Guichard said they saw strong improvement in consumer confidence in October and in November, followed by weakening in December and January.

“So, it's very hard to tie it to the election,” Guichard said. “The only thing we see that is really tied to the election is in the write-in responses. To what's affecting people's view of the economy since November, we saw an uptick in references to the elections, the president, the political situation, the policies.”

The Conference Board found inflation expectations ticked up, likely reflecting stickier inflation in recent months.

Purchasing plans for homes and cars were flat in January.

More consumers planned to buy big-ticket items over the next six months than not, but that share was down slightly, according to The Conference Board.

January’s fall in confidence was led by consumers under 55 years old.

Consumers 55 and over saw a small uptick in confidence.

By income group, the sharpest decline in confidence was seen in households earning over $125,000.

Consumers at the bottom of the income range reported the strongest gains.