At NHFPI, we’re all about putting facts and figures into the hands of Granite Staters. This Father’s Day, we thought we’d celebrate fathers the way we know best: data about dads in New Hampshire.
More Than a Quarter Million Dads with Kids at Home
In New Hampshire, approximately 271,400 fathers were living with their children in the households during the 2020-2024 period. That number of dads living with their kids was the equivalent of nearly 47% of males age 16 and older living in the state. This figure does not incorporate fathers who have children who grew up and moved away, or who otherwise live outside of the dad’s household.
Dads in Families
New Hampshire’s population was distributed across about 556,000 households in the 2020-2024 period. About 286,000 of those households were a family with a married couple. Of the married-couple families, about 95,000 had their own children under 18 years old living with them. About 12,000 more households were headed by fathers living with children under 18 and without a spouse present, including about 6,000 who did not have a partner, married or unmarried, present in the household.
About 41% of married-couple households with children had young children, age five years or less, living with them. That was true for about one-third of unmarried dads as well, who were more likely to have children age 6 to 17 and no younger children living in their households than married couples overall, while unmarried moms were even more likely to have an older child in the household but not a kid under 6 years old.
Stretching a Dollar
Both married couples and families with single parents can face economic hardships, and a greater percentage of households with young children generally have lower incomes. These lower incomes may reflect the difficulty parents have engaging in the labor force without sufficient access to early care and education for young children in the household.
Families led by fathers without spouses were about twice as likely to have incomes below 130% of the federal poverty threshold income levels than married-couple families in the 2020-2024 period in New Hampshire. About 2,400 families, or 25% of all families with unmarried fathers as the male householder with his children present, had these low income levels, which was below $28,107 for a parent under 65 and one child in 2024, or $32,855 for a single parent with two children.
The cost of core living expenses, including the price of child care, have increased faster than overall inflation in the last two decades. With the average price of having an infant in center-based care in New Hampshire for a year estimated to be $16,462 in 2025, many parents, including single parents, may face significant tradeoffs relative to earning a living at work and caring for children at home. Housing and health care expenses have also increased faster than incomes in the two decades.
Adding these expenses and others together creates a challenging picture for both dads and moms, particularly those who rely on child care services. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator estimated total income covering living costs in New Hampshire for a household with one working adult and one child in New Hampshire would be $96,954 in 2026, or $46.61 per hour. For two working parents with two children, that required income was $133,955.
Median household income for a single father living with his child or children in New Hampshire during the 2020-2024 period was about $77,400, and for single mothers, it was about $50,800. A three-person family of any composition in New Hampshire during this time period, including married couples, had a median household income of about $134,300. These data suggest that, while some parents are earning the incomes they may need to support their families, many Granite State parents, including both moms and dads and particularly parents of young children, face challenges making ends meet.