Consumer and business confidence in Jamaica fell sharply in the fourth quarter of 2025, erasing gains built up over an election-year rally earlier in the year, according to the JCC Business and Consumer Confidence Indices run by Market Research Services Ltd and reported by the Gleaner. Overall consumer confidence dropped to 164 points from 198.7 points the previous quarter, and came in below the 175 points recorded a year earlier.
MRSL executive chairman Don Anderson noted that the survey, which typically polls around 1,000 respondents, reached only 430 people for the quarter because of hurricane-related disruption, widening the margin of error even as he maintained the smaller sample was still within extreme validity for reading the overall trend.
The timing explains the size of the drop. Hurricane Melissa struck at the end of October 2025, right in the middle of the survey quarter, disrupting transportation, agriculture and tourism simultaneously and doing it just as households and businesses had spent most of the year growing steadily more confident. A confidence index rebuilding from a genuine shock behaves differently than one recovering from a slow grind, sharper drop, but also a potentially sharper rebound once physical reconstruction visibly gets underway, which is the pattern worth watching in the index over the following few quarters rather than reading the fourth-quarter number in isolation.
For anyone reading property or investment decisions off sentiment data, the practical lesson is timing discipline: a single storm-affected quarter tells you about disruption, not about the underlying trend, and the more useful comparison is the index a year from the hurricane against the index the quarter before it hit.
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