(TNND) — 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 another report Tuesday 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 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.

Wade said the NFIB saw a record level of uncertainty in October. Most small business owners were uncertain about the path going forward, she said.

“So, in October, we kind of started at the top of the hill,” Wade said.

Since then, NFIB’s uncertainty index has fallen 24 points and, while still elevated, it’s getting closer to normal levels.

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NFIB’s optimism index is built off 10 components. Last month, seven increased, two decreased and one was unchanged.

But the highlight, Wade said, was that the net percent of owners expecting the economy to improve rose 16 points to a seasonally adjusted net 52%.

That’s the highest since the fourth quarter of 1983.

And the share of small business owners believing it’s a good time to expand their business rose to the highest reading since February 2020.

Wade said more small businesses want to expand, and more want to hire.

A seasonally adjusted net 19% of owners plan to create new jobs in the next three months, up one point from November.

The last time hiring plans were this high was May 2023, according to the NFIB.

A seasonally adjusted 35% of small business owners reported job openings they could not fill in December.

Wade said labor quality is the top issue for nearly one in five small businesses, and construction and transportation businesses have the hardest time finding enough quality labor.

Inflation remains the top problem most cited by small businesses.

“It's still a challenge,” she said.

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The consumer price index, a popular measure of inflation, will be released for December on Wednesday. November’s CPI rose at an annual rate of 2.7%, a big drop from the peak of inflation at 9.1% in June 2022.

Wade said small business owners are feeling less pressure to increase wages for their workers, which can put the clamps on their bottom lines. But the higher costs of supplies has been “a bit sticky for small business owners,” she said.

Inflation cooled enough to allow the Federal Reserve to start moving interest rates in the other direction, with three cuts since September.

A Bankrate expert previously said he expects another three interest rate cuts in 2025, but inflation remains high enough that interest rates might not fall as fast as expected.

Wade said that matters to small businesses, particularly those that need to finance expansion projects, but higher interest rates aren’t one of the top problems for small businesses.