I'm Tom DeMatteo. I own Owl's Nest Real Estate in Campton, New Hampshire, and a meaningful share of my week is spent on the phone with people who don't live here yet. The calls follow a pattern. Someone in Woburn or Braintree or Hartford has done the math on their property taxes, their commute, and what their equity buys them north of the border, and they want to know if moving to New Hampshire is actually as good a deal as the internet says it is.
I've walked hundreds of those families through the move — Massachusetts transplants mostly, but also New Yorkers, Connecticut refugees, remote workers from everywhere, and a steady stream of retirees. Some of them are thriving here years later. A few sold within eighteen months and went back. This guide is the conversation I have with all of them, written down — the real tax picture, the real cost of living in New Hampshire, an honest tour of the regions, and the parts of living here that nobody puts in the brochure.
The short answer
Is New Hampshire a good place to live? For the right person, it's one of the best decisions you'll ever make. You'll keep more of your paycheck than in any neighboring state, your kids will go to some of the best public schools in the country, and you'll live within an hour of mountains, lakes, or ocean — often all three. New Hampshire keeps landing at or near the top of national quality-of-life and safety rankings, and the fact that nearly 44 percent of recent migrants to the state came from Massachusetts tells you the people closest to us have run the numbers.
The honest caveats: property taxes are genuinely high, winter is five months long and means it, housing inventory is tight, and if you're moving to the rural half of the state — my half — you're trading conveniences for space. None of that is disqualifying. All of it belongs in your decision before you call a mover.
The tax picture, explained honestly
The tax story is the reason half my relocation clients call, so let's get it exactly right, because most articles get it half right.
No tax on wages. New Hampshire has never taxed earned income. Your paycheck is not taxed by the state, period.
No sales tax. Nothing at the register, on the car, on the furniture for the new house. Retiring couples furnishing a home notice this immediately; so does anyone who's been paying 6.25 percent in Massachusetts.
The last income tax is gone. For years the asterisk was the Interest and Dividends Tax, a levy on investment income. That asterisk is dead: the tax was fully repealed effective January 1, 2025, which makes New Hampshire one of the few states with no personal income tax of any kind — wages, dividends, interest, capital gains, Social Security, pensions, retirement account withdrawals. For anyone retiring to New Hampshire on a portfolio, that repeal changed the math meaningfully.
Now the tradeoff. The state has to fund schools and services somehow, and it does it through property taxes. New Hampshire's average single-family property tax bill was $8,174 in 2025 — among the highest in the nation, with the state's effective rate ranking sixth-highest nationally. And the rates vary enormously town to town — two towns ten minutes apart can differ by $8 or more per $1,000 of assessed value depending on how they fund their schools. Here in Campton the 2025 base rate was $17.46 per $1,000; some towns run under $10, others over $30. When I work with relocating buyers, the town tax rate goes into the spreadsheet next to the list price on day one, because a cheaper house in a high-rate town can cost more per month than a pricier one next door.
The whole-picture verdict, and I say this as someone who writes two property tax checks a year: the Tax Foundation still ranks New Hampshire's overall tax burden among the lowest in the country. Most families moving from MA to NH come out ahead — sometimes far ahead — but the gain shows up in your paycheck and disappears a little at the town tax bill, so run both numbers, not just the fun one.
What it actually costs to live here
The cost of living in New Hampshire runs above the national average — this is still New England — but well below Massachusetts. Statewide cost-of-living indexes put New Hampshire roughly 10 to 15 percent above the U.S. average, against 35 percent or more for Massachusetts. Gas is cheaper than over the border, car insurance runs meaningfully lower, and the missing sales tax quietly compounds on everything you buy.
Housing is the number that matters most, so here's the honest snapshot rather than a stale figure: as I write this, the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS reports a statewide median single-family price around $530,000, with prices roughly flat to slightly up year over year and homes taking a bit longer to sell than during the frenzy years. The catch is inventory — the state has been running at less than half its pre-pandemic supply of homes for sale, which is why well-priced houses still move fast. And the medians hide a huge spread: Rockingham County on the Seacoast runs well over $600,000, while up in Coos County you can still find homes under $250,000. Where you land in the state changes your budget more than when you buy. Don't trust any article's price table for long, including mine — check what's actually on the market the week you're shopping.
One more line item transplants underestimate: winter. Plowing, heating oil or propane, snow tires, and a generator if you're rural. Budget a few thousand a year for the season and you won't be surprised.
Where to live in New Hampshire — a tour of the regions
New Hampshire is small on the map and enormous in variety. Where to live in New Hampshire is really seven different questions, and I'll declare my bias up front: I live and work in the Lakes Region–White Mountains overlap, I think it's the best value in the state, and you should read this section knowing that.
The Seacoast. Eighteen miles of coastline and the priciest, most polished corner of the state. Portsmouth is a genuinely great small city — restaurants, culture, a working waterfront — and Exeter, Dover, and Durham each have their own gravity. You pay for it: this is the most expensive region in New Hampshire, and it's where Boston money lands first. Best fit for buyers who want walkable-town life and a manageable commute south.
The Merrimack Valley. Manchester and Nashua are the state's two biggest cities and the practical choice for Boston commuters and anyone who wants city services with New Hampshire taxes. Nashua regularly shows up on national best-places-to-live lists, and the surrounding towns — Bedford, Windham, Hollis, Amherst — are the classic landing pads for families moving from MA to NH: strong schools, quick highway access, biggest job market in the state.
The Monadnock Region. The southwest corner around Keene and Peterborough. Quiet, artsy, genuinely pretty, and cheaper than the eastern half of the state. The tradeoff is distance — no interstate runs through it, and Boston is a real drive.
The Lakes Region. My backyard, and the heart of what we do at Owl's Nest. Winnipesaukee is the headline — 44,000 acres and the towns around it, from busy Laconia and Meredith to quieter Gilford and Alton — but Squam, Newfound, and Winnisquam lakes each have their own character and their own price points. Plymouth gives the region a college town with a hospital. This is four-season living: boats in July, foliage in October, skiing forty minutes away in January. If lake life is the goal, start with our Lakes Region neighborhood guide, and if you're specifically hunting waterfront, we keep a running page of lakefront homes across New Hampshire — true waterfront is the scarcest product in the state and it trades accordingly.
The White Mountains. North of the lakes, the terrain stands up and the state gets spectacular. Lincoln, Woodstock, Campton, Thornton, Waterville Valley, and over the notches to Jackson and North Conway — this is ski country, hiking country, and increasingly remote-work country, since fiber has quietly reached towns like Campton. Real estate splits between resort-driven markets and real year-round towns; I've spent my career helping buyers tell the two apart. Our White Mountains neighborhood guide covers the corridor town by town.
The Upper Valley. Hanover, Lebanon, and the towns along the Connecticut River, anchored by Dartmouth College and the state's only academic medical center. Highly educated, economically stable, expensive for how rural it looks — the institutions prop up the market. If proximity to top-tier healthcare drives your decision, this region should be on your list.
The Great North Woods. Everything north of the notches — Berlin, Colebrook, Pittsburg. Moose, snowmobiles, and the cheapest real estate in New Hampshire by a wide margin. I love it up there, and I tell most relocating families it's not for them: winters are harder, jobs are scarce, and the nearest specialist may be two hours away. Know yourself.
Ask me for the best places to live in NH and I'll answer with a question — what does your Tuesday look like? Commuters belong south of Concord. Remote workers and lake people belong in my neck of the woods. Retirees split between the Seacoast, the Lakes Region, and the Upper Valley depending on whether the priority is culture, water, or a hospital.
Pros and cons of living in New Hampshire
Every relocation call eventually gets here, so here is my honest list — the same pros and cons of living in New Hampshire I give buyers sitting in my office.
The pros:
- The tax structure. No tax on wages, no sales tax, and since the 2025 repeal, no tax on investment or retirement income either. Nowhere else in the Northeast comes close.
- Safety. New Hampshire perennially ranks among the two or three safest states in the country. It's the thing transplants mention first a year after moving.
- Public schools. Top-five nationally in the major state rankings, with small class sizes.
- The outdoors, all of it. Forty-eight four-thousand-foot peaks, the big lakes, the seacoast, and ski areas from backyard hills to Cannon and Loon. Most of the state lives within thirty minutes of something worth doing outside.
- Proximity without the price. Boston is one to two hours from most of the southern half of the state. You can use the city without paying to live in it.
- Four real seasons. Foliage season alone converts people. There's a reason the leaf-peepers clog my roads every October.
- The live-free culture. Light-touch government cuts across daily life here — no seatbelt law for adults, no mandatory vehicle income checks, and notably permissive firearms laws; New Hampshire has been a permitless-carry state since 2017. Depending on your politics that's a feature or a bug, so I list it neutrally: it's the state's character, and you should know it before you move.
The cons:
- Property taxes. Covered above, and worth repeating: the low-tax reputation is real overall, but the town tax bill will be the biggest tax you pay, and on a fixed income it needs planning.
- Winter is long. Reliable snow and cold from December into March, with shots on either side. If you don't ski, sled, or at least own a good coat and a sense of humor, five months is a long time.
- Mud season and bug season. More below. They're real.
- Housing supply. Tight inventory means relocating buyers need to be decisive, and renters have it harder than buyers in much of the state.
- Rural distances. North of Concord, the hospital, the airport, and the good grocery store all get farther apart. City conveniences — delivery, transit, a choice of specialists — thin out fast.
- Demographics. New Hampshire is one of the oldest states by median age and not a diverse one. Young singles moving from a city sometimes find the social scene thin outside Portsmouth and Manchester.
Jobs, commuting, and the Massachusetts question
The classic New Hampshire play — and the reason moving from MA to NH is practically a regional tradition — is living north of the border and earning south of it. Fair warning on the taxes: if you physically commute to a Massachusetts job, Massachusetts still taxes that income. The full paycheck win comes when your job moves with you.
That's exactly what's been happening. Remote work turned New Hampshire's quiet migration gain into a surge — the Carsey School at UNH documented billions in income moving into the state during the pandemic years, overwhelmingly from Massachusetts, and the flow has settled back to a steady, decades-old pattern rather than reversing. Half my buyer calls now start with "I only go into the office twice a week." That sentence redraws the map: at two days a week, Campton at two hours from Boston competes with Nashua at fifty minutes, and the mountains win more often than you'd think.
For the true commuters: I-93 and the Everett Turnpike are the arteries, and rush hour at the border tolls is genuinely bad — budget ninety minutes-plus from Manchester to downtown in traffic. Boston Express runs coach service from park-and-rides in Nashua, Londonderry, Salem, and Manchester into South Station and Logan, and plenty of commuters drive to Lowell and ride the MBTA in. A Nashua–Manchester commuter rail extension has been studied for years; don't buy a house betting on it.
In-state, the job market is stronger than people expect — healthcare, defense and advanced manufacturing (BAE is one of the state's largest private employers), education, and tourism — with unemployment that habitually runs below the national rate. The honest limits: wages for many in-state jobs trail Boston, and the deep-career-market jobs cluster south of Concord and on the Seacoast.
Schools and healthcare
Schools are one of New Hampshire's quiet superpowers. The state consistently ranks in the top five nationally for public education, and districts like Hanover, Bedford, Windham, and Exeter compete with anything in Massachusetts. The critical local wrinkle: because schools are funded largely through local property taxes, quality and tax rates vary town by town, and school district lines drive real estate values here the way subway lines do in a city. When families tell me schools are the priority, we shop districts first and houses second. Up my way, Campton kids go through a solid K–8 and on to Plymouth Regional — I covered the local setup in my Waterville Estates guide.
Healthcare deserves equal honesty. The flagship is Dartmouth Health, the state's largest health system, anchored by Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon — the state's only academic medical center, with a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center. The Seacoast and Manchester areas have strong hospital coverage too, and Boston's world-class hospitals remain reachable from the southern tier.
The rural reality is different, and I tell retirees this directly: north of the lakes, you're relying on excellent but small critical-access hospitals — Speare in Plymouth, Littleton Regional, Memorial in North Conway — for everyday care, with the serious stuff referred to Lebanon or Manchester, an hour or more away. For a healthy sixty-five-year-old that's a footnote. For someone managing a condition that needs a specialist every month, it belongs at the center of the where-to-live decision, and it's a legitimate argument for the Upper Valley or the Seacoast over my beloved mountains.
The seasons nobody warns you about
Everyone asks about winter. Winter is the one you already know about: it's long, it's real, and it's also the point — half the people moving here are moving for it. Buy the snow tires, line up a plow guy in September, respect ice dams, and you'll be fine. The people who struggle with New Hampshire winters are the ones who try to endure them instead of using them.
The seasons nobody warns you about are the other two.
Mud season. When the frost lets go — roughly late March through April — dirt roads turn to soup, towns post weight limits, and that gorgeous gravel driveway you bought in August becomes a rut farm. It's also the gray season: snow's gone, leaves aren't out, everything's brown. Locals schedule their Florida trips for April. If you're buying on a dirt road, I will make you drive it in April before you close. I mean that.
Black fly season. From about Mother's Day to Father's Day, tiny biting flies own the outdoors, worst near running water and worst of all up north — the UNH Extension has a whole fact sheet on them. Then come the mosquitoes, and everywhere in the state, ticks are a serious, check-yourself-every-hike reality from spring through fall. None of this stops anyone from living here. All of it surprises people who moved for the postcard.
What the postcard gets right: September and October in New Hampshire are as good as this continent does, and a clear July day on a lake makes the whole ledger balance.
Who thrives here, and who doesn't
After hundreds of relocations, the pattern is clear enough that I'll just say it.
People who thrive: families trading a Massachusetts mortgage for better schools and a yard; remote workers who wanted the mountains all along; retirees whose income now goes completely untaxed and who genuinely like four seasons; anyone whose ideal Saturday involves a trail, a lake, a chairlift, or a woodstove. Self-sufficient people, broadly — the ones who see a snowstorm and think about the generator, not the group chat.
People who struggle: anyone recreating city life — if you need delivery food, transit, nightlife, and an airport twenty minutes away, only a couple of NH zip codes even try, and none fully deliver. Sun-chasers — if February genuinely gets you down, five months of winter won't negotiate. Fixed-income buyers who fell in love with the "no taxes" headline and didn't model an $8,000 property tax bill. And people with intensive medical needs who buy deep in the woods — beautiful idea, hard reality.
I'd rather tell you this on the phone before you move than list your house for you two years after.
Your first 60 days — the practical checklist
Once the moving truck is unloaded, New Hampshire gives you a clock. Here's the checklist I hand every relocating buyer at closing:
- Driver's license — 60 days. New residents who drive must get a New Hampshire license within 60 days of establishing residency. Bring your old license, proof of identity, and two proofs of your NH address; decide whether you want the REAL ID version while you're at it.
- Vehicle registration — same 60 days. Registration is a two-stop dance unique to here: start at your town clerk's office (that's also where the town's portion of the fee is collected), then complete the state portion — many town clerks handle both in one visit. Miss the license deadline and the DMV won't renew your registrations, so do these together.
- Voter registration. No waiting period — you can register as soon as you live here, at the town clerk's office ahead of time or same-day at the polls, with proof of identity, age, citizenship, and residency. In a state that votes first in the nation and decides statewide races by a few thousand votes, your ballot suddenly matters here.
- Declare residency like you mean it. If you're leaving a state with an income tax, that state has an interest in claiming you didn't really leave. Change the license and registrations promptly, update your address with the IRS and your banks, register to vote here, and spend the majority of your nights here — your accountant will thank you at your first audit-free tax season.
- The unofficial list. Line up a plow contract and a heating fuel supplier before October, not during the first storm; confirm internet service at the actual address, not the town; introduce yourself to the town clerk, who in a small NH town is the operating system of your new life; and go to town meeting in March at least once. It's self-government at a scale you can see, and it's where that property tax bill gets decided.
Let's find your town
Moving to New Hampshire is really two decisions — whether, and where — and the second one is where a local broker earns their keep. My team at Owl's Nest has walked hundreds of out-of-state families through this exact move: we'll tell you honestly whether your budget works better in Laconia or Campton, pull the actual tax rate and school data for any town you're considering, and drive you up a dirt road in April if that's what it takes to make the decision real.
Start by browsing the newest listings across our markets, dig into the Lakes Region and White Mountains guides, or just call the office and tell me what your Tuesday looks like. I still answer my own phone, and I'd rather talk you into the right town than the quick sale.