New Hampshire’s population isn’t growing very much, but compared to our Northern New England neighbors, we’re practically knee-deep in babies.
Census Bureau data released this week shows that New Hampshire’s population has grown a feeble 1.39 percent in six years since the 2010 census.
Concord and surrounding towns, classified by the bureau as a micro metropolitan area, grew slightly faster – 1.46 percent – while the Manchester-Nashua metropolitan area, which has about one-third of the total state population, grew even more, by 1.76 percent.
All of those are well below the national growth rate (4.66 percent) and far below growth rates in the South and Western U.S., which topped 6 percent.
Our slow growth isn’t welcome news to state officials who trying to lure and keep more residents, especially young adults through programs like Stay Work Play.
But they can take consolation in one thing: We’re not Maine, which grew by a feeble one-fifth of one percent over the same period, or Vermont, which actually shrank, losing one-fifth of one percent of its population.
This population trend is caused largely by demographics: Northern New England has the nation’s highest percentage of non-Hispanic whites, which has the lowest birth-rate of any major ethnic group in the U.S.
The 2016 figures are estimates based on surveys and housing and migration data.
It estimates that 1,334,795 people lived in New Hampshire on July 1, 2016.
That’s about 3,000 more people than are estimated to live in Maine – New Hampshire passed our eastern neighbor in population in 2014, the first time in a century we had more people than the Pine Tree State.
Vermont has less than half as many people as we do, an estimated 625,000.
