A growing gap between how much it costs for housing and how much residents are earning exists across New Hampshire — and nowhere is it clearer than in the cities.
In Lebanon, the hourly wage needed for one person to afford median rent in the city in 2026 is $47.06. But the statewide average median hourly wage, as of June 2025, was $25.29.
And $47.06 per hour is more than the average in New Hampshire for many essential workers: Registered nurses make an average of $45.49 per hour; electricians make $30.50; and childcare workers make $16.26.
The numbers, included in a new report by New Hampshire Housing, underscore a trend. As median home prices continue to hit record highs, workers in the Granite State are increasingly being priced out of the cities they serve.
Lebanon presents the starkest example of the high cost of rent, but other cities are not far behind, the report found. In Portsmouth, the hourly wage required to afford the median rent is $46.23 an hour; in Nashua it is $41.12; and in Dover it is $40.71 — each far above the $25.29 state median.
In 11 of New Hampshire’s 13 cities, the median rent in that city exceeds the state’s median wage, the report found. Just Franklin and Berlin defied that trend. The needed wages were determined by limiting spending on rent to 30% of income, the maximum level experts advise.
The report, titled “Housing is New Hampshire’s Future,” presents a number of data points indicating that New Hampshire’s housing scarcity is having measurable effects on employees, businesses and the broader economy.
As workers increasingly face higher rents in cities, more and more are forced to commute to their jobs, leading to burnout and thoughts of moving. Those living in apartments whose rents have not drastically increased are unwilling to leave them, reducing opportunities for new employees to move in. And the overall shortage has stymied businesses’ ability to attract talent and thinned the ranks of workers essential to thriving cities, like home health aides and nurses, the report warns.
“The effects of inadequate housing supply and housing choices are all around us,” said Rob Dapice, executive director and CEO of New Hampshire Housing, the quasi-public agency that conducts research and helps distribute federal housing grants, in an interview.
Affordability gap has widened since the pandemic
For decades, New Hampshire’s median income has steadily increased year after year, and housing prices have kept pace.
But the New Hampshire Housing analysis shows a dramatic shift after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. As wealthier out-of-state homebuyers sent New Hampshire housing prices skyrocketing, the amount of income needed to afford a home in the Granite State suddenly increased at a faster rate than the median income. That trend has persisted for six years, creating a yawning chasm between median incomes and home prices in New Hampshire that has begun to slow, but is not yet shrinking.
In 2026, the gap between the median annual income needed to buy a home — $160,885 — and the actual median income in the state — $103,983 — is $56,902.
Meanwhile, with median housing prices nearing $600,000, the percentage of New Hampshire homeowners who can afford that median price tag is 26%. Just 6% of renters, who don’t have homes to sell to help with down payments, can afford that median currently.
Some counties, like Strafford and Carroll, have worse ratios of home prices to incomes than others, like Coös. But median home prices in all counties currently exceed median incomes.
“Your businesses, your economic tax base needs employees, and to have employees, you need housing,” Dapice said.
In cities, housing stock not keeping up with jobs
In many of New Hampshire’s biggest population centers, it is not just the price of available homes keeping people out. It is also the number.
In Portsmouth, the report found, there are 3.37 jobs for every one nonseasonal house. In Lebanon there are 2.82 jobs per home, in Bedford 2.45 and in Concord 2.21.
It is normal for job centers to have slightly more employees than housing units. But one urban planner, Reid Ewing, a professor at the University of Utah, has said the ideal ratio is between 1.3 and 1.7 jobs per home. Some New Hampshire cities, like Keene, Manchester and Nashua, are in that range, the New Hampshire Housing report found, but many exceed it.
The ratios suggest that larger than ideal numbers of workers are commuting into places like Lebanon and Portsmouth, the report notes.
That “commute tax,” in turn, drives up transportation costs for workers, delays for employers and burnout. And it prevents potential economic cohesion, known as agglomeration, that allows certain areas to thrive, experts warn.
“It enriches the life of the community when you have people who serve the community who can also live there,” Dapice said.
No quick fixes
Facing those structural barriers, some New Hampshire employers are turning to remote work, the report notes. But New Hampshire Housing said the proportion of remote work jobs in New Hampshire was just 16% in 2024, and remote flexibility is not feasible in many professions.
“Remote work cannot staff an operating room,” the report states.
Nor, the report argues, can employers solve the problem on their own by financing housing. Through a series of interviews with state businesses, New Hampshire Housing highlighted some examples: the CEO of Monadnock Community Hospital, Richard Scheinblum, said he bought a condo to lease it to a physician. “I don’t want to be in the property management business,” Scheinblum said, according to the report. And such approaches “reach only a small share of the workforce,” the report notes.
There are some reasons for optimism in the housing market, Dapice said, such as a rise in the number of housing permits in New Hampshire that suggests an uptick in construction, and the eventual effect of a series of pro-housing zoning overhaul laws from 2025.
New Hampshire Housing has projected for years that the state needs more than 90,000 housing units by 2040 to keep up with its population. Its report noted that the state is making progress: Between 2020 and 2025, developers built 39% of the housing units needed by 2030, and 25% of those needed by 2040.
Some counties have made a bigger dent than others: Between 2020 and 2025, Coös had already built 72.9% of its proportionate share of the statewide units needed by 2040, while Rockingham had built 25% and Hillsborough — which requires the largest number of new housing units as the most populous county — had built 22.9%, according to the report.
But Dapice said the economic argument for housing from businesses is still fighting to be heard. And more and more, businesses should sound the alarm themselves, he said.
“I think there is tons of opportunity there,” he said. “If we can go from like 1% of employers talking about it to their local select board and city council to 3%, I think that will really move the needle.”
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