Every month, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) asks a sample of small business owners across the country how hiring is going. The June survey opened with genuinely good news: owners want to add people again. Sixty-two percent were hiring or trying to hire in June, up seven points from May.
Then comes the number that explains the mood on the ground. Fifty-one percent of all the owners surveyed reported few or no qualified applicants for the jobs they were trying to fill. Among the owners actively trying to hire, that share was 84%. It's the highest that figure has reached since September 2024.
I run a funding company, so owners tell me what's slowing them down. For the past few years the answer has usually been costs, and costs still top most lists. What's changed is how often a second answer comes up right behind it: the demand is there, the plan is ready, and everything is waiting on a position that nobody qualified has applied for.
Owners went back to hiring, and the applicants didn't show up
Start with what improved. Owners planning to add jobs over the next three months outnumbered owners planning to cut them by 11 percentage points in June, right at the survey's long-run average. Job openings rose too: 32% of owners had a position they could not fill, three points more than in May, which had been the quietest month for openings since May 2020.
The unfilled jobs aren't only the specialized ones. Twelve percent of owners couldn't fill even unskilled positions, up three points in a single month. And the applicant problem runs deeper than thin resumes: 24% of all owners reported finding no qualified applicants at all.
The worry has moved from what workers cost to whether they exist
The NFIB also asks owners to name the single most important problem facing their business. In June, 19% picked the quality or availability of labor, up six points from May and tied for second place on the list, behind only inflation. A month earlier, that worry had fallen to its lowest point since December 2016. It didn't stay down long.
Labor costs moved the opposite direction. Only 8% of owners called labor costs their biggest problem in June, down six points from a record high just one month earlier. And while most businesses that are raising pay kept raising it, the pace cooled: owners increasing compensation outnumbered those cutting it by 28 percentage points, the narrowest margin of the year.
My read is that price has stopped being the main obstacle. For years the standard fix for a thin applicant pool was to offer more money. The June numbers show owners easing off raises at the same time the applicant problem is getting worse.
The Federal Reserve Banks see the same thing from a different angle. In their 2026 Small Business Credit Survey of employer firms, hiring or retaining qualified staff was the second most common operational challenge owners reported for the prior year, behind only reaching customers and growing sales.
What it sounds like inside a small business
The NFIB report publishes write-in comments from the owners it surveys, and the June comments say more than the percentages do. A manufacturer in Kansas put it this way:
"The need for labor is the top need. We struggle to find good people to hire. It is so bad it makes it impossible to grow even though the sales are out there for the taking."
A cleaning business in Wisconsin described the knock-on effect, because its customers can't hire either:
"Other businesses would like to contract us (they can't find people, so we get more work). However, we have to turn work away due to not being able to hire anyone!"
That second comment is worth sitting with. The same shortage is handing that company extra demand with one hand and blocking it from serving that demand with the other. A plumbing contractor in South Carolina added the small-town version of the problem: experienced technicians are hard enough to find anywhere, and harder still to attract outside a major metro area. In all three comments, nothing is wrong with the business itself. The constraint is people.
Four moves when hiring is the bottleneck
- Pay to keep before you pay to find. The most reliable qualified worker in this market is the one already on your payroll. A retention raise or a stay bonus for someone proven costs real money, but compare it honestly with the full price of a vacancy: the recruiting spend, the months of training a replacement, and the work you'd turn away in between. When half of owners can't find qualified applicants, your trained people are exactly who everyone else is trying to hire.
- Run recruiting like marketing, not like paperwork. Posting an ad after someone quits is the hiring version of only advertising when sales dip. Staying staffed in a market like this one takes a standing budget line: referral bonuses for current employees, relationships with local trade schools and training programs, and a pipeline that keeps running even when there's no opening today.
- Hire for attitude, pay for the training. If the experienced person you need doesn't exist in your area, the alternative is building one. Covering a certification, an apprenticeship, or months of lower productivity while someone learns is a real investment with a real payback period. It's also the one fix that widens your applicant pool instead of fighting everyone else over the same few names.
- Help the team you have produce more. When the next worker can't be found, the other lever is output per person: equipment that does in one pass what used to take three, software that eliminates an admin day, vehicles that aren't in the shop every month. Owners usually think of equipment as a growth purchase. In this labor market it's also a hiring workaround.
The hiring problem is also a cash flow problem
Every one of those moves costs money before it returns any. The retention raise hits this week's payroll. The referral bonus, the tuition, the machine all get paid for up front, while the revenue they protect or create arrives over the months that follow. That gap between spending on people and earning from them is a working capital gap, the same shape as an inventory buy or a slow-paying invoice.
A working capital loan fits the defined, one-time version: funding a training program, a recruiting push, or a round of retention pay without draining reserves. Equipment financing fits the output-per-person lever, spreading a machine's cost over the years it will earn. Our guide to working capital loans covers how the first one works, what it costs, and who qualifies.
The squeeze lands hardest in businesses that run on skilled hands. We see it across manufacturing and the home service trades, where an unfilled position is a truck that doesn't roll. Nail salons feel the same pull, with federal projections counting roughly 24,800 openings a year for licensed techs, and nail salon funding often goes to guaranteed pay while a new tech builds a book. And if you're on the other side of this market, running a staffing or recruiting firm, the Wisconsin comment above is exactly why your phones are busy: businesses that can't hire contract the work out instead. Staffing firms carry their own cash flow gap, paying people weekly while clients pay on Net 30 or Net 60 terms, and we fund that side of the market too.
Funding your next hire with Monera Capital
Monera Capital funds established U.S. businesses across twenty industries, generally those with at least six months in operation and $10,000 or more in monthly revenue. Seeing what you qualify for starts with a soft credit pull that won't affect your score, and decisions typically come back within 4 – 8 hours. If growth is waiting on people you haven't found yet, we're glad to help you work out which of these levers your numbers support.
Data in this article comes from the NFIB's June 2026 monthly jobs report and its June 2026 Small Business Economic Trends report (each a copyright of the NFIB Research Center), including the member comments quoted above, and from the Federal Reserve Banks' 2026 Small Business Credit Survey report on employer firms. Figures are the latest available as of publication and are subject to revision by their sources.