As New Hampshire falls further behind its regional counterparts on how much it pays in a minimum hourly wage, legislative efforts to boost the compensation in 2025 face a steep uphill climb.
State Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, is championing legislation this session to essentially double the minimum wage here.
“Raising the minimum wage is an economically sound policy with positive results from the dozens of other states that have acted on this already,” Altschiller said.
But Republican resistance, led by Gov. Kelly Ayotte, threatens to keep the Granite State at the low end of the minimum wage scale.
The current minimum wage in New Hampshire is $7.25 per hour, the federal default since New Hampshire hasn’t by law established its own minimum.
As the calendar turned from 2024 to 2025, several states in the region increased their minimum wage:
- Connecticut, with New England’s highest minimum wage and the third highest in the country, went from $15.69 to $16.35;
- Massachusetts remained static at $15;
- Rhode Island went from $14 to $15;
- Maine went from $14.15 to $14.65;
- Vermont went from $13.67 to $14.01.
Altschiller, who represents District 24 in the state Senate, proposes legislation in this session to establish a minimum wage of $12 per hour by September 2025 and then a second increase to $15 by July 2026.
“We have a responsibility to our New Hampshire workforce to establish a competitive minimum wage,” she said.
The Democratic senator is well aware of the Republican opposition that starts at the top of state government.
“I’m aware of her opposition a decade ago to raising the federal minimum and at the time she referred to minimum wage as a matter for the states,” she said, referring to Ayotte’s opposition to raising the federal minimum wage while she was a U.S. senator. “Now is her chance to support working Granite Staters who are paid less than minimal living wages.”
During Ayotte’s campaign for governor, she held to the position that the market should determine wages and that businesses in New Hampshire currently pay their workforce well above minimum wage in order to recruit and retain workers.
ZipRecruiter, the online job search and hiring tool, says the current average hourly wage in New Hampshire is $30.27 per hour. “This is equivalent of $1,210.94 a week or $5,247.42 a month. Most salaries in New Hampshire range between $43,101.00 (25th percentile) to $81,450.00 (75th percentile) annually,” ZipRecruiter says in its analysis.
Pay is heavily influenced by the job and the type of work available in any given market, according to ZipRecruiter.
In a list of communities and their average hourly wage, it lists Concord, the state capitol, at the top with $34.19. Berlin, home to a federal prison, is second at $33.52. Manchester comes in at $33.16, Lebanon at $31.82, Merrimack at $30.84, Portsmouth at $28.65, and Nashua at $28.58.
A living wage calculator devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology denotes what an individual in a household must earn to support themselves and/or their family, working full-time, or 2080 hours per year.
Per the calculator, that should be $23.58 per hour for a single/childless adult in New Hampshire.
The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute (NHFPI) used the MIT calculator in its recent analysis of 2023 economic data that show about 98,000 people in the state lived in poverty.
It says in 2023, poverty level incomes in the state were $15,852 ($7.62 per hour, based on a 40-hour work week) for a single person under 65 years old, $21,002 ($10.09 per hour) for a household with one adult under 65 and one child, $24,526 ($11.79 per hour) for two adults and one child, and $30,900 (14.86) for two adults with two children.
In general, according to the institute, New Hampshire’s median household annual income grew to about $97,000, which was an increase from approximately $90,000 in 2022.
“Even after adjusting for inflation and accounting for statistical uncertainty, the median Granite State household experienced a boost in the real purchasing power of the median household in 2023. Incomes had previously slipped behind inflation in 2022, and 2023’s increase brought inflation-adjusted income to about the 2021 level, the prior peak, rather than growing to a new high,” Phil Sletten, the institute’s research director, said in his analysis.
But there are wide disparities from county to county.
During the 2019-2023 period, according to the institute, median household income in Coos County, the northernmost and least populous county in the state, was about $58,000 ($27.88 per hour) in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars, which was the lowest among the counties in the state.
Rockingham County, the second-most populated New Hampshire county and the closest to metropolitan Boston, had a median household income of about $114,000 (54.80 per hour), which was the highest in the state and nearly double that of Coos County.
Pay influences everything from the ability to buy groceries to the ability to pay rent or a mortgage.
In a fact sheet, NHFPI says that, based on 2023 income levels, a New Hampshire household would have needed to spend about 49 percent of its monthly income to afford a median-priced house in 2024. The median price of a single-family home in New Hampshire in 2024 was $514,00, as previously reported by NHBR.
