7/18/25 Housing Matters Newsletter

After a few weeks without hitting your inboxes, we have legislative news and a new policy report to share. This week, Governor Ayotte signed a bipartisan series of pro-housing regulatory reforms that will help unlock more housing options for Granite Staters.

On Thursday, the National Low Income Housing Coalition and Housing Action NH released New Hampshire’s 2025 Out of Reach Report, which found that full-time workers need to earn $35.08 per hour to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent in New Hampshire. Read more about both of these items below.

As a reminder, our monthly Housing Matters Zoom meetings are taking a break over the summer. We will see you in September.

As always, if you have questions about the legislation we mention in the newsletter or housing-related proposals that aren’t included, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

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Best,
Nick Taylor

Executive Director
Housing Action NH
nick@housingactionnh.org

On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Ayotte signed into law a bipartisan package of housing bills that will make it easier to create more housing choices across the Granite State.

The reforms include allowing homeowners to build accessory dwellings (HB 577), making it easier to convert vacant strip malls and office buildings into housing (HB 631), and several laws that reduce regulatory barriers. These are common-sense changes that help address our housing challenges: high costs, limited options, and growing demand.

While there is still much more work to do, we thank Governor Ayotte and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for recognizing that regulatory reform is key to our housing future. Read our press release.

The full list of housing related bills signed on Tuesday includes:

• HB 296: relative to issuing building permits along private roads.
• HB 413: relative to subdivision regulations on the completion of improvements and the regulation of building permits.
• HB 457: relative to zoning restrictions on dwelling units.
• HB 577: relative to modifying the definition of ADUs (read our one pager).
• HB 631: permitting residential building in commercial zoning (read our one pager).
• SB 110: relative to terrain permitting.
• SB 188: relative to third-party inspections.
• SB 281: prohibiting municipalities from denying building or occupancy permits for property adjacent to class VI roads under certain circumstances.
• SB 282: relative to stairway requirements in certain residential buildings.
• SB 284: relative to authority for municipalities to regulate mandatory on-site parking requirements.

This builds on three bills that were signed earlier this year, including:

• SB 4: relative to the C-PACE program
• SB 173: relative to residential property subject to housing covenants under the low income housing tax credit program.
• HB 399: establishing a commission to study the New Hampshire zoning enabling act

Full-time workers need to earn $35.08 per hour to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent in New Hampshire. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Housing Wage in New Hampshire is $35.08 – that means low-wage workers would need to work 3 or 4 full-time jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

This is New Hampshire’s “2025 Housing Wage” according to Out of Reach, a report published jointly today by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and Housing Action New Hampshire.

Out of Reach is an annual report that documents the gulf between wages and what people need to earn to afford their rents. The report’s “Housing Wage” is an estimate of the hourly wage full-time workers must earn to afford a rental home at HUD’s Fair Market Rent without spending more than 30% of their incomes. In 2025, the national Housing Wage is $33.63 per hour for a modest two-bedroom rental home and $28.17 for a modest one-bedroom rental home.

In New Hampshire, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,824. In order to afford this level of rent and utilities – without paying more than 30% of income on housing – a household must earn $6,081 monthly or $72,971 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into an hourly Housing Wage of $35.08. Granite Staters would need to work 194 hours per week at minimum wage to afford a 2-bedroom rental home.

Significant disparities between what renters earn and their housing costs leave their housing security especially precarious during periods of economic uncertainty. Out of Reach 2025 sheds light on how recent economic downturns have led to long-term increases in the prevalence of housing cost burdens among the lowest-income renters. Housing cost burdens prevent low-income renters from affording other basic necessities and also keep them at constant risk of housing instability.

Read our blog post.