The Affordable Care Act had no impact on hiring plans, according to 78 percent of small- and mid-sized companies surveyed by PNC Financial Services Group Inc. The biannual survey included telephone interviews with 501 businesses in the U.S.

“Our labor market isn’t going to tank because of the Affordable Care Act, but it’s a sizable minority (of businesses) taking a guarded approach,” Mekael Teshome, a PNC economist, told The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch in a report on the Ohio results of the survey alone.

However, the national PNC survey found that fewer small- and mid-size businesses, overall, plan to hire in the next six months. Only 16 percent of businesses plan to add staff; that compares to 23 percent who planned to add staff when asked a year ago.

Of those hiring in the next six months, one in five intend to rehire formerly laid-off employees or add temporary staff for short-term labor needs.

A separate, monthly measure of small business hiring trends, the CBIZ small business employment index, decreased by 2.15 percent in September following an increase of 1.23 percent in August. However, CBIZ Payroll Services president Philip Noftsinger said the monthly decline was consistent with historical trends. “Typically, during this period, students are returning to school and deflating the overall employee counts in the businesses and industries that employ them,” Noftsinger said in a press release. CBIZ’s index includes data from 3,500 companies with 300 or fewer employees.