The deadline to apply for fuel assistance is Sunday, April 30, though community action agencies say they will accept applications through Monday, May 1.
Assistance with heating bills through the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) can be retroactive, and residents can submit unpaid bills from this heating season with their application.
Fuel vendors can also submit back bills, according to Ryan Clouthier, the chief operating officer at Southern New Hampshire Services. Those bills can date back to Oct. 1 for deliverable fuels, Nov. 1 for metered fuels and utilities, and Dec. 1 for customers whose heating is included in their rent.
April 30 is also the deadline for applications to the state’s emergency energy assistance program approved by legislators last fall. Under that program, Granite Staters who don’t qualify for LIHEAP but make under 75% of the state median income can apply for $450 in fuel assistance and $200 in electric assistance.
Residents can apply for fuel assistance through the state’s community action agencies. Electric assistance is available year-round through those agencies, and utility companies offer payment plans that can reduce the amount customers owe on their bills.
Visit this explainer for more guidance on applying for energy assistance in New Hampshire
More than 36,000 households applied for LIHEAP or the state’s energy assistance program this winter – higher than the number of applications throughout each of the last three years, according to New Hampshire’s Department of Energy.
Ryan Clouthier said it was hard for Southern New Hampshire Services to keep up.
“We brought on more staff. We had staff who were working extra hours, working nights and weekends,” he said.
Clouthier said a substantial portion of the new interest in fuel assistance was due to the state program, but many people who applied for that program were actually eligible for federal assistance, he said. They ended up getting larger benefits through that program.
Some residents reported longer delays this winter for their fuel assistance applications than in past years.
Terra Rogers, the director of energy services at Southwestern Community Services, said applicants waited, on average, 60 days.
“It was definitely a very trying year to get through, between the increase in LIHEAP and trying to process all of these other applications with being short-staffed,” she said.
Only about 2.2% of the $35 million appropriated for state emergency funds have been distributed, according to numbers from the Department of Energy released Friday. As reported by the New Hampshire Bulletin, that has raised questions about the outreach efforts for the program, with Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington saying the program “completely failed.”
Chris Ellms, the deputy commissioner of New Hampshire’s Department of Energy, said the state Legislature’s choice to target the program based on income, rather than making it open to all Granite Staters, “introduced uncertainty.”
“The Legislature erred on the side of appropriating too much rather than too little,” he said, “with the idea that any over-appropriations would lapse to the General Fund at the end of the state’s fiscal year.”
The state program could have provided benefits to approximately 50,000 households, according to Ellms. As of Friday, 1,208 households had been enrolled in state electric assistance and 1,237 households have been enrolled in state fuel assistance.
