Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Defense Department Contracts for Work in New Hampshire Topped $2.5 Billion in Fiscal 2025. Nearly Half the Money Went to One Company.

Federal spending records show the Pentagon committed $2.54 billion to contract work performed in New Hampshire in the year that ended September 30, 2025, more than twice the fiscal 2016 total. More than nine of every ten of those dollars went to work in Hillsborough and Rockingham counties.

In the federal fiscal year that ran from October 1, 2024, through September 30, 2025, the Department of Defense obligated $2,536.2 million on contracts for work performed in New Hampshire. That is the figure USAspending.gov, the federal government’s public database of awards, reported as published in October 2026, counting contract obligations by where the work is done.

Spread over the state’s 1,377,529 residents, the 2020 census count that USAspending uses for its per-person figures, that comes to $1,841 per resident. Among the 50 states, New Hampshire ranked 13th on that measure. The figure for all 50 states together was $1,376 per resident. In total dollars, New Hampshire ranked 33rd.

Ten years of contract dollars

The fiscal 2025 total was 2.3 times the $1,118.4 million obligated in fiscal 2016. The path between those years was not a straight line. Obligations rose each year to $2,144.8 million in fiscal 2019, fell to $1,371.7 million by fiscal 2021, and stayed below $1.6 billion through fiscal 2023. Then they jumped. Fiscal 2024 brought $2,588.5 million, a gain of $1,064.6 million, or 70 percent, in one year. Fiscal 2025 came in $52.3 million lower.

Over the ten fiscal years from 2016 through 2025, the department obligated $18.05 billion for contract work in the state.

What the numbers count, and what they leave out

An obligation is money the government has committed to spend, not money it has paid out. The Congressional Research Service draws that line in its guide to USAspending: obligations are “money committed to be spent,” while outlays are the money the government pays out. A large contract action can commit money in one fiscal year for work that runs across several, so a single year’s total can rise or fall with the timing of a few big awards.

The same report advises searching by place of performance rather than by the recipient’s address to see where money is spent, which is how the figures in this article are drawn. It notes that Defense Department data can reach the database about 90 days after the award, longer than the 30 days required of agencies generally, and it warns that “search results may be incomplete or contain inaccuracies” because of data quality problems the Government Accountability Office has identified.

The figures here are prime contracts only. Work a prime contractor passes to a subcontractor is reported separately in USAspending and is not added in. They also leave out Defense Department grants, military and civilian payroll, and spending by other agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose New Hampshire spending Granite State Report examined in “The VA Spent $1.44 Billion in New Hampshire in Fiscal 2025”.

One company, nine registrations

USAspending lists contract recipients by registration, and one company appears under nine. In fiscal 2025, BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration Inc., whose parent the database lists as BAE Systems PLC, received $1,258.0 million in Defense Department obligations for work in New Hampshire. That is 49.6 percent of the state’s total. Four of the registrations, located in Nashua, Hudson and Merrimack, New Hampshire, and Wayne, New Jersey, account for $1,255.7 million of it; the other five net $2.3 million. The amounts are counted by where the work is performed, so the dollars under the New Jersey registration are for work in New Hampshire.

The next two recipients were Sig Sauer Inc., registered in Newington, at $403.5 million, and L3 Technologies, Inc., registered in Londonderry, at $313.6 million. Together, the three companies took $1,975.1 million, or 77.9 percent of the state’s fiscal 2025 total.

The same three companies account for most of the jump from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024. Obligations to BAE’s largest registration rose from $570.5 million to $1,016.8 million. L3 Technologies went from $72.9 million to $322.7 million, and Sig Sauer from $98.1 million to $209.7 million. The database records what was obligated. It does not explain why a given year’s orders were larger, and this article does not try to.

Two counties

By county, the money was more concentrated still. In fiscal 2025, work in Hillsborough County drew $1,458.9 million, or 57.5 percent of the state total, and work in Rockingham County drew $930.9 million, or 36.7 percent. Together that is 94.2 percent. Seven other counties shared $146.4 million, and Carroll County did not appear in the results.

The shipyard across the river

The best-known military workplace on the New Hampshire seacoast does not show up in these figures at all. The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which overhauls and repairs the Navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarines, is in Maine. The Naval Sea Systems Command describes its location as “the southernmost tip of Maine in downtown Kittery.” Contract work performed there counts toward Maine’s place-of-performance total, and the pay of the shipyard’s civilian workforce is payroll, not a contract award, so it would not appear in a contract count for either state.

New Hampshire and its neighbors

Measured per resident, New Hampshire ranked fourth of the six New England states in fiscal 2025. Connecticut ranked first among all 50 states, at $9,604 per resident. Maine ranked seventh and Massachusetts tenth. Vermont and Rhode Island ranked below New Hampshire.

The records set out the scale and the concentration: about $2.5 billion a year in fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025, nearly half of the fiscal 2025 total to one company and more than nine of every ten dollars to work in two counties. They do not show how many New Hampshire jobs the contracts support or how much of the money stays in the state once subcontracts are paid, and neither does this article.

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Contract obligations, recipients, registered locations, county amounts and per-resident figures are drawn from USAspending.gov, the federal award database maintained by the Treasury Department. The definitions of obligations and outlays and the cautions on data quality and reporting lag are drawn from the Congressional Research Service guide cited above. The shipyard’s location and mission are drawn from the Naval Sea Systems Command. Ranks, shares, sums and differences the sources did not state are Granite State Report arithmetic from those figures.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.