Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire Needs Young Workers. It Built a State They Can’t Afford.

The state’s own agencies publish the numbers: a $182,000 income to buy the middle house, $30,000 a year for child care, dead last in the country on higher education funding, and a $7.25 wage floor the Legislature refused to touch in March.

To buy the median single-family home in New Hampshire, a household needs to earn about $182,000 a year. Fifteen percent of New Hampshire households earn that much. Those figures are not from an advocacy group or a national magazine. They come from New Hampshire Housing, the state’s own housing finance authority, in a report it published last October under a title that reads like a dare: Who Can Afford to Live in New Hampshire?

The state has an answer. It is not the one Concord offers at ribbon cuttings.

New Hampshire is not losing young people. It is sorting them. The Granite State gains adults in their late twenties, thirties and early forties, people who arrive with savings, equity or a Boston salary. It loses the ones who do not have those things yet. Nearly 1,000 tax filers under the age of 26 left New Hampshire in 2024, according to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. About half of the 2,046 net new tax filers the state gained between 2022 and 2023 were adults aged 26 to 44. New Hampshire is importing young adults who can already afford it and exporting the ones who cannot.

That is not a demographic accident. It is the output of a cost structure the state built and keeps choosing not to dismantle.

The price of the front door

New Hampshire Housing arrived at $182,000 by counting the full monthly carry on a median-priced house against the standard that housing should not consume more than 30 percent of income. The Fiscal Policy Institute ran a narrower version for 2025, counting mortgage and property taxes at that year’s median price, and landed just above $158,000, roughly $76 an hour for a 40-hour week. The two numbers are not in conflict. They are two ways of measuring the same wall. Take the lower one and a household still needs to earn about $60,000 more than the state median to buy the middle house on the block.

Prices here did not drift. They were driven. Adjusted for inflation, New Hampshire home prices climbed 129 percent since 1998 while household incomes rose 19 percent. Between 2019 and 2025 the median single-family price rose 78.3 percent on its own. In June the New Hampshire Association of Realtors reported a statewide median of $575,000 and an affordability index of 53, meaning the median household earns 53 percent of what it takes to carry the median house. That tied the record low set a year earlier. The national median single-family price that month was $429,300.

Renting is not an escape hatch. It is a holding pattern. Fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Hampshire runs $1,824 a month. Carrying it at the 30 percent standard takes $72,971 a year. The average renter in this state earns $20.92 an hour.

One hundred ninety-four hours

Here the state’s own law enters the story. New Hampshire’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and it is $7.25 because the Legislature made it $7.25 and then walked away. In 2011 lawmakers passed House Bill 133 over Governor John Lynch’s veto, repealing New Hampshire’s own minimum wage and tying the state permanently to whatever Congress sets. Congress last acted in 2009.

Every other New England state has moved. Vermont pays $14.42. Massachusetts pays $15.00. Maine pays $15.10. Rhode Island pays $16.00. Connecticut pays $16.94. New Hampshire pays the federal floor, alone in the region. A full-time worker earning it grosses about $15,080 a year.

Run the housing arithmetic against that wage and you get a figure that should end the argument. To afford a modest two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent, a Granite Stater earning the minimum would have to work 194 hours a week. There are 168 hours in a week. Nick Taylor, who directs Housing Action New Hampshire, called the gap what it is: “This is simply unsustainable.”

The Legislature had a bill in front of it. House Bill 1484, filed by Representatives Kathy Staub, Dylan Germana, Kristina Schultz and Christine Seibert along with Senator Patrick Long, would have set a state minimum of $12 an hour in September 2026 and stepped it to $17 by 2029. The Labor Committee recommended killing it on a vote of 11 to 9. On March 5 the House voted 180 to 153 to lay it on the table. Seven days later a motion to take it back up failed 159 to 183. The bill died without a recorded vote on its merits.

Thirty thousand dollars to go to work

Say a young couple clears the housing hurdle and has a child. In 2025 the average price of center-based care in New Hampshire for an infant and a four-year-old reached roughly $30,000 a year, up from about $22,500 in 2017. Infant care alone averages $16,462. For a married couple with two children under five earning the median family income, that eats about a quarter of everything they make. For a single mother earning the median income for unmarried mothers in New Hampshire, it eats about 61 percent.

Sixteen thousand dollars for one infant exceeds a year of in-state tuition and mandatory fees at most of New Hampshire’s public four-year campuses, where the 2025–26 range runs $15,068 to $19,682. It is nearly triple the $5,520 annual tuition at a New Hampshire community college. Parents are paying university prices to keep a job.

Supply is shrinking under them. Between 2017 and 2025 New Hampshire lost 120 licensed child care programs, a 14 percent decline, with licensed home-based programs down 32 percent. This past session the Legislature repealed the requirement that the Department of Health and Human Services include full funding for child care workforce support programs in its budget request. Those programs had drawn $7.5 million a year. House Bill 1515 became law without the Governor’s signature.

Fiftieth out of fifty

New Hampshire graduates carry among the heaviest student debt burdens in the country, and the cause is not mysterious. The state funds public higher education less than any other state in the union. In fiscal year 2024 New Hampshire appropriated $4,629 per full-time equivalent student against a national average of $11,683. Measured per resident, the state budgeted $120 for public higher education in fiscal 2025. The national average was $380. Arizona, the next lowest, spent $166.

The bill lands on students. New Hampshire’s public colleges draw 68 percent of their revenue from tuition, against a national average of 39 percent; at the four-year campuses students cover 76.8 percent. The current state budget cut the University System’s appropriation by 17.6 percent, or $35 million. Tuition then rose between 2.5 and 4.9 percent at the four-year campuses and nearly 7 percent at the community colleges.

Families respond rationally. Roughly 56 percent of New Hampshire high schoolers seeking a four-year degree left the state to get one, and students who leave for school frequently stay gone. The state that funds college least also has the hardest time keeping the graduates it produces.

Then, on July 1, the federal rules changed under them. The U.S. Department of Education shut down the SAVE plan and began moving 7.5 million borrowers into new options, chief among them the Repayment Assistance Plan. RAP stretches the road to forgiveness to 30 years, against 20 or 25 under the plans it replaces, and Graduate PLUS loans are closed to students starting programs after that date. Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent stated the governing principle without hedging: “if you take out a loan, you must pay it back.”

That is a defensible rule. It is being applied to a cohort that borrowed because New Hampshire declined to fund the alternative.

Who owns the country

Pull back from the state and the pattern holds, and the Federal Reserve keeps the ledger. Rather than take a secondhand summary, Granite State Report downloaded the Board’s Distributional Financial Accounts and ran the series directly.

In the third quarter of 1989, households headed by someone under 40 held 12.0 percent of all household net worth in the United States. In the first quarter of 2026 they held 6.6 percent. That is the same age bracket measured in two eras, so it is not a story about young people simply being young. Their share of the nation’s residential real estate fell from 22.0 percent to 12.4 percent across the same span. Households headed by someone 70 or older rose from 18.9 percent of net worth to 32.7 percent.

The debt moved the other way. Under-40 households now carry 34.9 percent of the country’s consumer credit, the category that includes student loans, while holding 6.6 percent of its wealth. In 1989 that ratio sat below four to one. Today it is better than five to one. Younger households own less of the country and owe more of it.

The consequence shows up in who buys houses. The National Association of Realtors reported last November that first-time buyers made up 21 percent of the market, the lowest share since it began tracking in 1981 and roughly half the pre-2008 norm. The median first-time buyer is now 40 years old, an all-time high; in the 1980s that buyer was in their late twenties. The median repeat buyer is 62. The median seller is 64. American homeownership has become a transaction between older people.

The receipt

New Hampshire has recorded more deaths than births every year since 2017. Every net person added to this state’s population in recent years arrived from somewhere else. Carsey School demographer Kenneth Johnson found that between the 2020 Census and July 2025, all three northern New England states buried more residents than they delivered, and immigration accounted for New England’s entire regional gain.

A birth rate is a leading indicator of whether people believe they can afford a life. New Hampshire’s has been answering that question the same way for nine consecutive years.

The state is not ignorant of any of this. Its own institutions publish the evidence. New Hampshire Housing wrote the report asking who can afford to live here. The Fiscal Policy Institute laid out the three obstacles facing young workers, housing and child care and higher education, in the New Hampshire Bulletin last month. The data is on the record and it is not close.

What Concord did with it this session is the part worth remembering. Lawmakers passed real zoning reform: multifamily housing permitted on commercially zoned land, limits on parking mandates, easier conversions of existing structures. Those changes matter, and in a home-rule state they took some nerve. But as the Fiscal Policy Institute recorded in its session wrap-up, “no new funding to support housing efforts was appropriated.” The current two-year budget puts $5 million a year into the Affordable Housing Fund. The prior budget carried $35 million for that fund, plus $10 million for InvestNH and $5.25 million for the Housing Champions program.

Deregulation is free. Capital is not. A permit does not pour a foundation, and a zoning amendment does not lower a rent that is already signed.

The generation being priced out is not asking to be rescued. It is asking for arithmetic that closes. A $7.25 wage floor under a $575,000 housing market is a policy choice. Ranking fiftieth in higher education funding while your graduates carry the nation’s heaviest debt is a policy choice. A $30,000 child care bill arriving before kindergarten is a policy choice about who is permitted to raise a family here.

Every one of those choices was made by people with names, in rooms with dates, recorded in journals with roll calls attached. On March 12 the number was 159 to 183.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against a primary or agency source before publication; see the fact-check table. The wealth figures were computed by Granite State Report directly from the Federal Reserve’s published Distributional Financial Accounts dataset rather than taken from a secondary summary. Two credible estimates of the income required to buy a median-priced New Hampshire home differ because they use different price years and cost components; both are reported here rather than choosing one. The Affordable Housing Fund comparison is Housing Action New Hampshire’s accounting of two state budgets and is labeled as attributed. Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice, which examines how policy costs are transferred from older generations to younger ones. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.