New Hampshire’s Small Businesses in 2026, by the Numbers

No tax on wages, no general sales tax, and since 2025 no tax on interest and dividends either: New Hampshire asks little of individuals and more of their businesses. Those businesses include 145,314 small firms, 99.0% of all New Hampshire companies, and they employ 309,420 people, about half the private workforce.

The SBA notes that 50.3% employment share topped the national small business figure in 2022, and in the latest year small firms out-hired the whole economy on net. Private employment edged up 0.7% in 2024, new business applications reached a series high in 2025, and at $79,034 the average private wage runs high.

The primary sources behind these figures, federal and state, are gathered at the end.

New Hampshire, a State of Small Employers

By the SBA’s 2025 New Hampshire profile, 145,314 small businesses make up 99.0% of the state’s roughly 146,800 companies, up about 2,700 from the year before.

• 30,411 small employer firms make up 95.3% of the state’s employers and 45.9% of its payroll, $18.0 billion in 2022.
• The no-payroll side holds 114,903 nonemployer businesses, $8.07 billion in 2022 receipts, 88.2% sole proprietorships.
• In 2024 the state had 64,226 private establishments, 66,884 counting government, by BLS tallies.
• Counting solo ventures, the largest small-business industry is professional and technical services, 22,542 firms, most without staff; construction follows at 20,672.

High Wages and the Sectors That Carry Them

Health care and social assistance is the largest private employer, 97,772 jobs, about 16.2% of the total, and it added the most in 2024, 3,099. Retail is second at 90,418, a size the state’s lack of a sales tax helps explain by drawing cross-border shoppers. Manufacturing is third at 68,487 on pay well above average, and it lost the most jobs of any sector, 1,823. Accommodation and food, fourth at 60,306, pays the least. The names behind these numbers stay off the page; only the industry cells appear.

• Information pays the most, $149,213 on average, then utilities ($138,701) and finance and insurance ($134,895).
• Management of companies averages $132,308 and professional services $131,893, both far above the field.
• The low end runs accommodation and food at $30,641, arts and recreation at $31,673 and retail at $44,502; the statewide private average, $79,034, is itself high.

Among the sectors with small-business employment data, manufacturing leans on small firms least, under half its jobs, while construction leans on them most, nearly all of them; New Hampshire’s best-paying work sits in tech and finance cells that read as totals, never as names.

The Chips-and-Instruments Side of New Hampshire

Manufacturing’s largest slice is computer and electronic products, 15,239 jobs at $134,133, more than a fifth of all New Hampshire manufacturing. Inside it sit semiconductor and electronic components, 5,245 jobs, and navigational and control instruments, the single highest-paid manufacturing cell in the state at $182,876; machinery adds another 6,996 jobs. No plant is named.

The professional, scientific and technical sector pays $131,893 and operates more establishments than any other, and computer systems design alone is 14,974 jobs at $166,559. This is the Nashua-Manchester tech corridor as the data records it, no firm named.

One high-paying New Hampshire cell the data keeps hidden statewide is securities and commodity contracts, withheld for confidentiality; it surfaces only in the counties, where Rockingham’s cell averages $261,332.

The Southern Counties That Hold the Payroll

Private New Hampshire crowds into its southern corner, and the county cells, which set government aside at about an eighth of all jobs statewide, show how tightly. Hillsborough County alone, built around Manchester and Nashua, carries 179,909 private jobs, close to a third of the state at 29.8%. It also pays the most of the five areas here, $80,607, and it was the only one to slip in 2024, off 0.6% as manufacturing pulled back.

• Rockingham County, on the seacoast, is unusual in that retail, not health care, is its largest private sector, 24,289 jobs, the cross-border draw of a state with no sales tax.
• Merrimack County, home to the capital at Concord, is the most government-heavy of the five, its public sector at 20.7% of jobs.
• Strafford County, around Dover and the state university, slipped 1.3% in 2024.
• Grafton County, at Lebanon and Hanover, is an academic-medical hub, health care 27.7% of its private jobs.

The Machinery Cluster in Cheshire County

In Cheshire County, at Keene, machinery is 2,116 jobs, larger than in any of the five counties profiled above, and manufacturing narrowly outweighs health care; county pay runs about a quarter below the state average. Cells only, no plant named.

Together the five profiled counties hold about 78% of New Hampshire’s private jobs, packed into the southern tier and the Concord, Dover and Lebanon-Hanover hubs; the northern half of the state carries a thin share.

What New Hampshire Added and Lost in 2024

Private employment rose 0.7% in 2024, a net 4,038 jobs, a modest year. What follows is the record of it: where hiring landed, then where it slipped.

• Arts and recreation posted the year’s fastest percentage gain, up 9.3% (1,281 jobs).
• Health care added the most jobs outright, 3,099, a 3.3% rise.
• Construction and professional services each grew close to 3%.

The losses landed on the higher-paid side. Information fell 4.8%, wholesale shed 1,160 jobs, and manufacturing, the biggest drop in raw numbers, lost 1,823, a 2.6% dip; finance and insurance eased by the same 2.6%. It was a year when the wards and building sites hired while the electronics benches and trading floors thinned.

A Steady Rise to a Fresh Filing Record

New business applications in New Hampshire have trended up since the pandemic, with one flat year. Summed from monthly Census data, and so best read as close estimates, they ran near 12,900 in 2018, dipped in 2019, hit 13,780 in 2021, jumped to 16,026 in 2023, held essentially flat in 2024 at 15,977, and set a series high of 17,046 in 2025, about 53% above 2019.

Underneath, the establishment count stayed positive: 7,032 opened against 6,374 closures in the year to March 2024, a net 658. On jobs, small businesses added 6,023 on net against the whole economy’s 5,733, so small firms did a shade more than all of the state’s net hiring, with large employers a slight drag.

The FY2024 Loan Split and a Flat Export Total

Both of the SBA’s guaranteed-loan programs grew their loan counts in fiscal 2024, though the dollars told two different stories, and New Hampshire’s export total barely moved.

Rising Loan Counts, a Dollar Story That Split

The 7(a) side drove the growth: its loan count jumped 48.2% and its dollars 35.4% over fiscal 2023, reaching 587 loans and $130.4 million.

• The 504 program grew its count too, up 27.0% to 80 loans, yet its dollars fell 22.5% to $33.0 million, a shift to smaller average loans.
• Together the two came to about 667 loans and $163.3 million; the microloan program is left out here, having no tier-1 figure this year.
• By district, the seacoast-and-Manchester side (NH-01) carried the larger share of both programs.
• Community Reinvestment Act data adds $313.7 million lent to New Hampshire firms with revenues under $1 million in 2023, off 2022’s $329.0 million.

A Steady Export Base

New Hampshire’s export value held near $6.8 billion in 2023, a shade above 2022, spread across 2,432 exporting firms. Small firms are 2,055 of them, 84.5%, and their $2.5 billion is 36.2% of the value, a comparatively high small-firm share that eased slightly from a year earlier.

A Business Base Part Rural, Part Metro

New Hampshire’s ownership splits fairly evenly across rural and urban ground: of its classifiable businesses, 53,371 are rural and 74,662 urban, a 41.7% rural share, in the 2022 Census counts, the shape of a southern-metro state with a northern hinterland.

• Women own 41.4% of New Hampshire businesses, 5,119 of the employer firms among them and 3,615 more owned equally with men.
• Veterans own 7.3% of businesses against 5.2% of the workforce, 8,879 in all, 1,579 with employees.
• Owners of Hispanic origin hold 3.3% of businesses (4,284, of which 484 employ staff); minority ownership is a small share of the total, on 2022 figures.

Gross Product and the Money Visitors Leave

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, New Hampshire’s economy grew about 2.1% in 2025, after 1.4% in 2024; in current dollars it stood at $125.5 billion, up from $119.3 billion, per federal accounts.

Visitors and What They Spent in FY2023

The state tourism office’s fiscal-2023 figures, from Dean Runyan, size up the visitor economy.

• 14.3 million visitors came in fiscal 2023, spending $7.3 billion.
• The office calls tourism the state’s second-largest revenue industry and credits it with about 70,000 jobs.
• The Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee region alone drew 1.4 million visitors and $400 million in spending.

Set beside the tech and export figures, tourism rounds out a picture of an economy that pairs high wages and exports with a four-season visitor draw, paid for through business and consumption taxes rather than a tax on wages.

The Tax Bill New Hampshire Actually Sends

The state that skips a wage tax and a sales tax still sends business owners a bill, just a different kind.

The Business Taxes That Replace an Income Tax

New Hampshire levies no tax on earned wages and no general sales tax, and as of January 1, 2025 it no longer taxes interest and dividends either; that tax, the last piece of a personal income tax, was repealed after stepping down from 5% to 3%. What the state does tax is business: a Business Profits Tax of 7.5% on New Hampshire profits, which the smallest firms fall below a threshold to avoid, and a Business Enterprise Tax of 0.55% on the wages, interest and dividends a business pays out.

• The one broad consumption tax is the 8.5% Meals and Rooms tax on prepared food, lodging and vehicle rentals; ordinary retail goods stay untaxed.
• With no income or sales tax, the state leans on local property tax, which runs high.
• The minimum wage is the federal $7.25, since New Hampshire sets no higher floor; the tipped cash wage is $3.26.

The Certificate of Formation and What Follows

An LLC starts with a Certificate of Formation, not Articles of Organization, filed with the Secretary of State for $100; reserving a name first costs $15. The recurring duty is an annual report, due April 1 each year for $100, with a $50 late fee. From the first filing onward, our guide to starting an LLC in New Hampshire sets out the sequence in full.

Every New Hampshire LLC also keeps a registered agent and registered office in the state. Our head-to-head roundup lines up the registered agent services in New Hampshire for owners weighing that choice.

The fully-handled route runs through the providers ranked in our list of best LLC services in New Hampshire, ranked by cost and setup speed.

New Hampshire Answers on Tax and Filing

Sources

• The SBA Office of Advocacy’s 2025 New Hampshire Small Business Profile is the source for the counts, dynamics, ownership and export figures.
• Sector, subsector and county cells for 2024 are taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
• The application series belongs to the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics, the solo-business counts to its Nonemployer Statistics.
• Fiscal 2024 loan figures were summed from the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan-level files.
• The GDP figures, current and real, are the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional accounts‘.
• The Certificate of Formation and annual-report fees are set in the New Hampshire Revised Statutes (RSA 304-C) and filed through the Secretary of State.
• The business, interest-and-dividends and Meals and Rooms tax facts follow the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration.
• The federal minimum wage applies under RSA 279:21, per the New Hampshire Department of Labor.
• The FY2023 visitor figures are the New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development‘s.