Median household incomes in southeastern New Hampshire continue to be above the statewide median, particularly in smaller suburban and exurban communities. These higher incomes show the impact of metropolitan Boston on New Hampshire’s economy, pushing wages up as distance to eastern Massachusetts decreases.

This geographic pattern of incomes is not a new story. Each annual release of these U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Survey data has shown a similar pattern stretching back to at least the 2007-2011 data. But with these 2019-2023 data, more of the geographic changes in income distributions following the COVID-19 pandemic, and shifting demographics overall, are coming into focus.

Population changes from 2020 to 2023 show substantial growth in amenity-rich areas of the state, including the Lakes Region and near to the White Mountains. These changes could be due, in part, to more remote work opportunities enabling people to move to rural areas, and more people with higher retirement incomes moving to second homes or away from urban areas to retire.

While having pockets of higher income households outside of southeastern New Hampshire is not a new phenomenon, some of the locations and concentrations of those pockets may be changing. Communities near Hanover, Lebanon, and Lake Sunapee have typically had median incomes above the statewide median, but towns around Lake Winnipesaukee have previously had median incomes below, or statistically indistinguishable from (due to data limitations), the statewide median. That status likely reflected the lower incomes of many people who live and work in these communities, rather than those who vacation or have second homes there. However, the latest data show continued rising incomes in the Lakes Region, with Gilford, Belmont, Alton, and Sandwich all above the 2019-2023 statewide median household income of about $95,600; Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro were indistinguishable from the statewide median, while some recent datasets covering prior years had shown them below the statewide median. Although this trend is not strong or universal among communities in the region, it has persisted in recent data.

While these data can provide helpful insights, they should be used with caution, particularly when comparing communities to each other. These data are based on surveys, and small towns may have had very little survey data collected from them to form the basis of these estimates. Margins of error provide an indication as to the level of certainty in these estimates; communities with different estimated median household incomes may be statistically indistinguishable from each other if the margins of error around one estimate bracket the estimated median income for another. Comparisons to the statewide median household income provide relatively reliable insights into the relative household incomes in a community, due to more data collected statewide in these surveys.

Growth in metropolitan Boston continues to be a key driver of the New Hampshire economy, continuing a decades-long trend. However, these data suggest the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the geography of household incomes may result in long-term changes in certain rural parts of the state.

     – Phil Sletten, Research Director