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New Hampshire Commuting Patterns

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Residence County to Workplace County Flows for New Hampshire

You have heard it many times. New Hampshire is just a bedroom community for Boston workers. The impression is that most Granite State workers rush out the door to drive down to Boston and report to work. The implication is that New Hampshire has no economic engine of its own; that the Granite State depends completely on Boston wages to pay for New Hampshire livelihoods. However the truth about New Hampshire commuters is a little more complex.

Data from Census 2000, published in March of 2003, shows commuting patterns for the United States workforce on a county basis. The commuter data tracks the number of people 16 years and older by their county of residence, compared to the county that contains the firm where they report for work. The following tables summarize this data for each of the ten New Hampshire counties, and shows the out-of-state counties where commuters (either into or out of New Hampshire) number about 1,000 or more.

Download the NH commuting patterns Excel worksheet

The data shows plenty of economic opportunity in New Hampshire for New Hampshire workers. Most people living in New Hampshire work in the same county they live in. In all but three New Hampshire counties 60 percent to 70 percent of the workers 16 years of age and older work in their resident county. The exceptions are Coos and Grafton counties, where more than 80 percent commute to in-county jobs, and Rockingham County, where a little less than half of the workers commute to jobs outside their resident county.

In every county in New Hampshire, the majority of the resident workforce works in New Hampshire, (in the same county or a different county in the Granite State). The in state commuting rate for New Hampshire counties is over 80 percent in Cheshire and Hillsborough, and 90 percent or better in every other county except one. Rockingham is again the exception, with an in-state commuting rate of just under 70 percent.

So more than 30 percent of Rockingham county workforce is employed outside of the Granite State. But most are not headed to Boston. Of the 40,000 plus Rockingham county residents that work out of state, only 4,400 work in Suffolk County (the Massachusetts county that is home to the city of Boston). Almost 22,000 Rockingham county commuters travel to jobs in Essex County, (the North Shore or Metro-North section of the Commonwealth), while about 14,000 commute to jobs in Middlesex County, home to businesses along the Route 128 beltway.

There is a similar pattern in Hillsborough County, where only about 3,000 residents report to jobs in Suffolk County. By comparison about 22,000 Hillsborough county residents commute to jobs in Middlesex County, while 4,500 commute to jobs in Essex County.

Not all the New Hampshire commuters leaving the Granite State drive to Massachusetts. More than 4,000 Granite Staters report to jobs in Maine from their homes in Rockingham and Strafford County, while another 4,000 or so commute to jobs in Vermont from homes in Cheshire and Grafton County.

While thousands of New Hampshire residents do work at jobs in other states, New Hampshire firms also provide jobs for workers who do not live in New Hampshire. More than 11,000 York County Maine residents commute to jobs in Rockingham and Strafford counties. Over 7,000 workers commute from Essex County in Massachusetts to jobs in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, while another 7,000 plus from Middlesex County in Massachusetts report to jobs in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire.

In total Maine is a bedroom community for 13,000 residents who hold New Hampshire jobs, while Massachusetts is a bedroom community for more than 20,000 Baystaters employed in New Hampshire.

Grafton County is the most interesting case – there are more jobs in Grafton County than there are workers to fill those jobs. In the year 2000 there were more than 49,000 jobs in Grafton County, but only 43,000 employed members of the county resident labor force. So who fills the positions? Vermont commuters make up for the shortage of available labor in Grafton County, traveling from their bedrooms in Windsor County (5,700), Orange County (2,500), and Caledonia County (about 1,000). Vermont is a critical source of labor supply to Grafton County, providing 18 percent of the employees in the county.

Clearly New Hampshire is much more than a bedroom community for metropolitan Boston. In every county but one at least four out of five New Hampshire workers commute to jobs in the Granite State. Most of the commuters out of New Hampshire are headed to northern Massachusetts, rather than Boston. The New Hampshire economy itself provides enough economic opportunity to employ thousands from other states, including Massachusetts. In fact, out-of-state commuters from Vermont are a critical source of labor to keep the businesses in Grafton County up and running.

More detail on NH Commuting Patterns by County available at the ELMI wesite.

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Dennis Delay
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