For years, New Hampshire’s population growth has depended on people moving here. But recently they’re doing less of it in a U-Haul, which may reflect a change in who is arriving.

Every year the move-yourself company ranks all states based on how many one-way U-Haul rentals came into the state vs. how many rentals left. It says that from 2021 through 2023, the most recent year of data, more rentals left New Hampshire than arrived.

The difference isn’t huge on a percentage basis – 49% of rentals involved people arriving here in 2023 while 51% involved departures – but it’s a switch from earlier years. The split was 50-50 in 2020 and in four of the five years before that, arrivals outdid departures.

For a decade New Hampshire has depended on people moving here to keep our population from falling; as an aging state we have more annual deaths than births. That migration pattern would seem to indicate that we should always see more inbound than outbound U-Hauls. Why aren’t we?

It’s hard to tell but one thing that has changed in the past two years is that more of the people who move here are coming from other countries than was the case in previous years, according to analysis of Census data provided by Ken Johnson of the Carsey School at UNH.

In 2023, for example, almost half of the people who migrated into New Hampshire – 4,290 out of 9,179 – were from other countries. That’s a much larger figure than in any recent year.

It seems logical that people coming from outside the country wouldn’t rent a truck in another state in order to move here, so perhaps that’s what we are seeing with the U-Haul data.