Granite Staters pay $22.9 billion. Their government costs $13.8 billion.
The argument against New Hampshire independence usually arrives as a ledger, and two different questions hide inside it. Balance of payments asks whether more federal money flowed into the state over a year than Granite Staters paid in federal taxes. Fiscal capacity asks whether Granite Staters, taxed exactly as they are taxed now, could fund the government an independent New Hampshire would actually need to run.
A household can send the IRS more than it gets back and still afford its own groceries. Only the second question decides anything.
$17.5 billion in federal taxes, plus $5.5 billion New Hampshire raises itself once every federal dollar is removed.
Every base, agency, grant, contract and state service inside New Hampshire, federal and state together.
The margin left after taking the entire social insurance system out of both columns at once. The generous test leaves $9.1 billion.
What comes off the cost side, and why
Social Security, Medicare, veterans' cash compensation and federal retirement are obligations Washington owes to the people who paid into them. They are portable. The same Social Security check follows a retiree to Florida or to Portugal, and an independent New Hampshire would no more have to recreate them than Portugal does. Those come off.
Everything a sovereign New Hampshire would genuinely operate and pay for stays on: defense, federal agency payroll and operations, grants including Medicaid, federal contracts, veterans' medical care, and the entire existing state budget. Medicaid stays in the cost column on purpose, as means-tested welfare the state already administers rather than an earned benefit anybody pre-paid.
The cost stack
Averaged across federal fiscal years 2022 and 2023, in billions.
- Total federal spending in New Hampshire, the broadest measure published: 21.7
- less Social Security benefits: 7.0
- less Medicare benefits: 4.2
- less veterans' cash compensation and readjustment: 0.6
- less federal civilian and military retirement: 0.5
- less one-time COVID relief: 1.3
- Federal cost of governing New Hampshire: 8.2
- plus state-funded expenditure: 5.6
- Total cost of government in New Hampshire: 13.8
Columns are rounded to one decimal and do not always sum.
Per resident, across 1.41 million people: $16,382 paid, $9,847 to govern.
The harder test
If Social Security and Medicare come off the cost side, the payroll taxes that fund them should come off the revenue side too. So take the whole social insurance system out of both columns and see what survives.
Doing that costs New Hampshire an estimated $6.6 billion a year in payroll taxes. On that symmetric basis Granite Staters pay $16.3 billion for a government costing $13.8 billion, and the state still clears by about $2.5 billion.
A large surplus is a number an opponent can argue with. Self-sufficiency under the most punishing accounting available is not.
Run the shock as well. Assume a hostile Washington, high trade friction, and independence knocking a full 10 percent off the state's economy in one blow, more than twice Britain's official Brexit estimate. New Hampshire still clears. The break-even sits at about a 15.5 percent contraction.
Why almost every state looks subsidized
The Rockefeller Institute's balance-of-payments series shows New Hampshire receiving roughly what it sends, so where is the burden? It is a serious piece of work and deserves a serious answer.
Washington spent $1.34 for every dollar it collected in fiscal 2025, and $1.37 the year before. The gap is not generosity. It is borrowed money, and it lands in the states as though it were income. Counting every state in Rockefeller's own table, not one state of fifty was a net payer in 2020 or 2021, and in 2023 only three were. A measure on which 47 to 50 states come out subsidized is not telling you which states are dependent.
What separates the subsidized states from the subsidizing ones is the national ratio. New Hampshire comes in at $1.00 against a national $1.34, one of the widest gaps below the line in the country. In fiscal 2022 the state received 88 cents per dollar paid, a net donor that year by $1.87 billion.
Most of what is left of the receipts is money Granite Staters already paid in. Counting a retiree's own Social Security check as proof that New Hampshire cannot stand on its own is the sleight of hand in the argument.
The bill for staying
New Hampshire pays 0.351 percent of all federal taxes collected in the United States. Run that share against books Washington keeps to the penny.
- $3.4 billion a year in net interest on the federal debt, which builds nothing in the state. It has more than doubled since 2019.
- $6.2 billion a year co-signed in new borrowing, in the name of people who never voted on it.
- $141 billion share of the accumulated debt, which works out to $100,585 for every man, woman and child in the state.
Interest sits inside the deficit rather than on top of it, and presenting the two as a sum would be a fraud on the reader. More than half of what New Hampshire co-signs each year is now the carrying cost of debt already run up.
The federal balance sheet is not merely expensive. The Treasury's own audited Financial Report carries a section headed "An Unsustainable Fiscal Path," and the Government Accountability Office signs that audit. All three major rating agencies have now stripped the United States of its top rating. Interest passed national defense for the first time in 2024.
What it settles
New Hampshire funds its own government, on the generous accounting and on the punishing one, at a cost of government running near 12.5 percent of what the state produces. Rich democracies spend between 38 and 44 percent of GDP on all government. New Hampshire is not straining under the cost of governing itself. It has headroom nobody is using, and it raises its revenue with no income tax and no sales tax at all.
It also disposes of the specific claim that New Hampshire is carried. Even on the measure most favorable to that claim, the one crediting every borrowed dollar and every returning benefit to the state, New Hampshire pays its own way to the dollar.
What separating would cost, and what it would be worth, are separate questions with their own page. This one answers whether the money works.
Sources
The ledger on this page comes from Can New Hampshire Make It?, September 2026, which carries the five-year series behind it, every source table, and a note on what was estimated and why.
- Federal tax collections by state: IRS Data Book Table 5, gross collections by type of tax and state.
- Total federal spending by state: Rockefeller Institute of Government, Giving or Getting?, covering federal fiscal years 2019 to 2023. Report page.
- Social Security, Medicare and veterans' benefits by state: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Economic Accounts, SAINC35.
- State government revenue and expenditure: Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State Government Finances.
- Federal receipts, outlays, deficit, net interest and debt: Treasury Fiscal Data, Monthly Treasury Statement and Debt to the Penny.
- The count of net payers is computed from Table 10 of the Rockefeller report, which carries every state's balance for nine years. Net payers by year: 12 in 2015, 10 in 2016, 8 in 2017, 8 in 2018, 7 in 2019, none in 2020 or 2021, 10 in 2022, and 3 in 2023, those being Massachusetts, New Jersey and Washington.
- Payroll taxes are never published by state. New Hampshire's share is modeled on the state's share of national wages and salaries, the method set out in Appendix D of the analysis.
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