This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
New Hampshire had over 14,000 public school teachers earning an average salary of $69,432 last year.
These educators, who are working with nearly 160,000 public school students around the state, are squarely in the middle of the pack for compensation, with a national ranking of 25th place, according to recent data from the National Education Association.
The data examines salaries, student enrollment and a number of other elements of the public education system, revealing that the Granite State is right in the center of the pack in some ways while, in others, it’s at the bottom.
Teacher pay technically rose in the past decade, but accounting for inflation, teacher compensation is estimated to have declined by about 7% since 2017.
Two years ago, the average starting teacher salary in New Hampshire was $44,010, a 3.3% increase from the year prior. Yet that year, the state dropped four spots in the national ranking, coming to rest at 42nd.
Compared to starting pay, top teacher salaries increased to an average of $79,482 for the 2024-25 school year, bringing the state up three ranks, from 33rd place to 30th.
Public educators’ wages “have fallen further behind those of similarly educated college graduates in other professions, widening the teacher pay gap,” according to the National Education Association. The organization cited an Economics Policy Institute report that found teachers earned an average of 73.1 cents per dollar relative to people in similar professions in 2024.
When it comes to other aspects of its public education system, New Hampshire doesn’t fall in the middle. In fact, it’s dead last in the nation for state funding, with only 28.2% of revenue coming out of the State House. The majority of education funding in New Hampshire is raised through local property taxes. (Washington, D.C. technically receives no state funding, putting it below New Hampshire, but the district is not considered a state.)
And that’s not all.
From the 2023-24 to this past school year, the number of public school teachers in the state declined by 6.74 %, marking the largest decrease in any state with the exception of Tennessee. New Hampshire student enrollment, however, dropped only by 1.47%.
In a state with an increasingly large population of elderly residents and an anticipated silver tsunami in the years ahead, the number of school-age children is markedly on the decline.
There were at least 45,000 more students enrolled in public and charter schools two decades ago in the Granite State. The decrease coincides with long-term shifts in demographics as a result of lower birth rates. The New Hampshire Department of Education attributes the smaller number of students to long-term shifts in demographics as a result of lower birth rates, which landed between 11,000 and 12,000 in 2025 compared to 14,000 at the start of the 2000s.
Nationwide, public school enrollment dropped by over 3% in the past decade, according to the National Education Association.
