Businesses in New Hampshire: 39,298 workplaces, a southern tier that works like part of Boston, and the top headquarters

This page is for anyone trying to find, size or vet New Hampshire businesses: buyers looking for local suppliers, job seekers, analysts and B2B sellers covering northern New England. It has the Census counts, where the businesses are, what they do, the public companies headquartered in the state, the official sources for checking a business, and a prospecting example among the state's electronics and instrument makers.

How many businesses are in New Hampshire

In bands: 33,458 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 4,966 with 20 to 99 and 874 with 100 or more. These are County Business Patterns (CBP) figures from the Census Bureau: business locations with paid employees, across all industries. A company with three offices counts three times, and owners working alone aren't counted.

New business formation is steady. The Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics show 17,046 applications to start a business in New Hampshire in 2025 (our sum of the monthly figures, not seasonally adjusted), up 53.0% from 11,142 in 2019. Of the 2025 applications, 5,205 (30.5%) were "high-propensity," meaning the Census Bureau expects them to become employers.

Where New Hampshire businesses are

Average pay is our calculation from CBP payroll. Two things stand out. First, the southern tier is the market: Hillsborough and Rockingham alone have 54.2% of establishments and 54.0% of jobs. Second, the Census Bureau puts Rockingham and Strafford counties, with 12,995 establishments between them, in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro area. Many companies there sell into, hire from and compete with Massachusetts, so a New Hampshire territory drawn on the state line splits real markets. Grafton County, home to Dartmouth, has the largest workplaces of the eight, 18.6 employees per site; Carroll County, in the White Mountains tourist region, has the smallest.

What New Hampshire businesses do

Shares and pay are our calculations. Retail is unusually large, at 15.2% of jobs against 11.5% across the US. Manufacturing is the other outlier. The state's Department of Business and Economic Affairs says New Hampshire has more than 1,700 manufacturers employing over 67,000 people, consistent with CBP's 1,741 establishments and 68,626 jobs. Much of it is technical: 79 establishments make semiconductors and other electronic components (4,728 employees) and 62 make measuring, navigation and control instruments (5,073 employees, a figure the Census Bureau marks as moderately affected by the noise it adds for confidentiality). Hillsborough County has 45 and 31 of those, respectively.

The largest public companies headquartered in New Hampshire

The nine largest listed companies whose latest 10-K gives a New Hampshire headquarters, all with more than $500 million in revenue, with the city from the filing's cover page:

White Mountains is incorporated in Bermuda but gives Hanover as its principal executive office. Revenue is total revenue as reported. Three of the nine are on the Seacoast (Portsmouth and Hampton), and the list holds few of the state's big private employers, such as hospital systems and privately owned manufacturers, which don't file with the SEC.

How to look up a New Hampshire business

A clean entity record shows a business exists, not that it's sound. For a supplier, also ask for a certificate of insurance and two references, and for a manufacturer, ask which quality certifications it holds and when they were last audited.

Prospecting New Hampshire's electronics and instrument makers

Illustrative example. The company, rates and results are fictional, to show the method.

Granite Metrology (granitemetrology.example) runs an accredited calibration lab and does on-site calibration of test and measurement equipment. Its best customers are mid-sized electronics and instrument plants, which have hundreds of gauges and meters but no in-house lab. It starts from the Hillsborough County figures:

• Semiconductor and electronic component establishments with 20 to 249 employees: 11 + 9 + 6 = 26.
• Instrument makers with 20 to 249 employees: 5 + 6 + 4 = 15, for 41 in all.
• It assumes each spends about $40,000 a year on outside calibration and that it can win one in five over two years: about 8 accounts, worth roughly $320,000 a year.

Its contact is the quality manager, who owns the calibration schedule and faces the audit, with the operations manager copied when on-site work would stop a line. Telling a 40-person instrument shop from a 40-person distributor, and finding its quality manager, is account-by-account research that Bebop handles for each name.

Subject: Calibration before your next audit at [Company]

Hi [first name],

Most plants your size in the Merrimack Valley send gauges out in batches and wait two to three weeks to get them back, which is when the overdue items pile up before an audit.

We calibrate on site in [Nashua / Manchester / Hudson], work around your shifts and load the certificates straight into your quality system. Could I send a sample certificate and our turnaround for a plant of [Company]'s size?

[Your name], Granite Metrology

Next step: to turn these counts into a list of named accounts, read how to build a prospect list.