Why Construction Businesses Are More Optimistic Than Food Service Owners
Ask business owners how they expect the economy to perform this year, and the answer depends a lot on which industry you ask. Our 2026 Annual Business Insights Report found real variation by sector, and the gap between the most optimistic and most cautious industries is wide enough to be worth understanding.
Construction businesses are the most optimistic group in the survey, with 63% expecting favorable economic conditions in 2026. Food Services owners land at the opposite end, with only 34% expecting favorable conditions and 42% taking a neutral stance, a group that's more likely to be sitting on the fence than genuinely pessimistic, but far less bullish than construction.
What's Driving the Optimism Gap
It's worth resisting the urge to over-explain a gap like this with a single tidy theory. A few plausible factors likely overlap. Construction has direct exposure to interest rate policy, and rate expectations shifted over the survey period. Food Services runs on thinner margins and more exposure to input cost swings, which may make owners in that category more sensitive to the inflation and tariff pressures the broader survey documented. Both are reasonable explanations. Neither is confirmed by this data alone.
What This Means Beyond the Headline Number
What the data does support clearly is that any national narrative about business optimism, including our own headline findings, is an average sitting on top of real variation. A business owner in construction and a business owner running a restaurant are living through measurably different years, even though they answered the same survey in the same month.
Larger businesses show a related but distinct pattern in the same report: 62% of businesses generating $1 million or more in annual revenue increased their use of technology in the past year, compared to 53% overall. Size, like industry, is quietly shaping how different segments of the small business economy are experiencing 2026.
If you're a construction business owner, this data says your optimism is shared, not an outlier read on the year. If you're running a restaurant or another Food Services business, the caution you might be feeling isn't unique to you either, it's showing up across your industry, and it's worth planning around continued tight margins rather than assuming conditions will loosen up on their own. Whatever industry you're in, the national headline number is an average sitting on top of real variation, and your own experience of the year may look nothing like it.
Findings are drawn from Fora Financial's 2026 Annual Business Insights Report, fielded in February and March 2026 among a screened sample of 300-plus U.S. business owners.
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