16.5% of Businesses Experienced Little or No Effect from Pandemic, 55.3% Expect Long-Term Challenges

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) started asking businesses in April of last year when they expect to return to normal levels of operations, a crucial indication of how they are adapting to the pandemic, social distancing, and other public health strategies.

The SBPS, which has provided near real-time information on how small-single-location-employer businesses have been faring since late April when it began collecting data, has now concluded its third phase.

Business expectations about the future of the economy, customer demand, and the availability of supplies and inputs impact key decisions from hiring to investing.

Sectors with relatively high percentages of businesses not affected by the pandemic or that already returned to normal level of operations include construction, finance and insurance, real estate, and administrative support.

From spring to winter, business expectations of a return to normal level of operations have shifted so that there are many businesses with expectations at opposite extremes: businesses with expectation of a short-term return to normal and those facing long-term challenges.

Expectations moved away from the medium-term horizon of two to six months to either the short-term horizon (little or no effect, already back to normal, or less than one month to normal) or the long-term horizon (more than 6 months, never, or business has closed) (Figure 1).

Care must be taken when interpreting changes over time as other factors, such as business survival and surveying only those businesses with email addresses, can bias the responses and two categories (“already” and “closed”) were added in the later weeks of the survey, potentially altering the distribution of responses across other categories.

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