People coming from other countries are playing an increasingly important role in New Hampshire’s small but consistent population growth, recent Census data shows.
The number of adults and children living in the Granite State grew 2.3% between the 2020 Census and 2024, an estimated increase over four years of 31,486 people, equal to about two-thirds the population of Concord. That compares to a national increase of 3.3% over the same period.
New Hampshire’s growth is due entirely to people moving into the state rather than what is known as “natural increase,” since 3,360 more New Hampshire residents died than were born during those four years. Such a difference isn’t unusual: migration rather than natural increase has caused all of New Hampshire’s population growth for almost a decade.
What is unusual, said Ken Johnson of UNH’s Carsey School of Public Policy, is that almost half of the most recent in-migration – 4,290 out of 9,179 last year – were people moving from overseas rather than moving from other states.
That’s partly because international immigration to the state has increased, more than doubling from the 1,542 people who arrived in 2020, as part of an increase of asylum-seekers and other immigrants to the country as a whole. But it’s also because domestic immigration to New Hampshire, or people moving from other states, has fallen from a peak in 2021.
“There was a surge of domestic migrants into New Hampshire in 2020, ‘21, ‘22, and I think a part of that was COVID giving people more flexibility where they could work from. That slowed down in the last year or two,” said Johnson.
The data, based largely on estimates taken from the annual American Community Survey, are not detailed enough to give answers about which countries are sending the most people into the Granite State.
New Hampshire’s population story is echoed throughout much of New England, which has the highest median age of any region in the country. Natural increase has slowed or reversed in all states as deaths increase while the number of births falls, with any growth coming from new residents moving here.
Every New England state grew over the past year except for Vermont, which lost an estimated 200 people. It now has slightly less than half the population of New Hampshire.
New Hampshire’s population passed that of Maine in 2015 for the first time since the Census of 1890 and is now about 1% ahead of the Pine Tree State.
New Hampshire had an estimated 1,409,032 people in mid-2024. It gained an estimated 6,800 people, or one-half of one percent, last year.
Johnson cautioned against reading too much into changes in immigration population because the Census Bureau has changed its technique for estimating the immigrant population in different areas.
“I think it probably is producing a better estimate of what is happening recently. The old method worked reasonably well when the immigrant population was sort of routinely coming into the country … through the early 2000s and early part of this decade. With the recent flood of asylum seekers, the data that the Census Bureau relies on to make its estimates didn’t pick up that kind of data very fast … because people have to have established residences to be in the (survey),” he said.
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