What changes and what does not.
Nobody here can settle any of this. These are questions for negotiators working under a mandate that does not exist yet, and anyone who tells you they know the answers is selling something. What can be done now is show how each of these questions has been answered by countries that actually faced them, so you can judge for yourself whether they are as frightening as they sound.
The dollar
The fear is that leaving means inventing a currency, and that a new currency means an exchange rate, a central bank, and a decade of everyone's savings moving around.
It does not follow, because using the dollar does not require anybody's permission. Seven sovereign countries use the United States dollar as an official currency today: Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama and Timor-Leste. Panama has done it since 1904. Ecuador adopted it in 2000 and El Salvador in 2001, both by their own decision, neither by treaty with Washington.
An independent New Hampshire could keep the dollar, and the cost of keeping it is that monetary policy stays in Washington, where it already is. What it would give up is a tool it does not currently hold.
Social Security and Medicare
This is the question that matters most in one of the oldest states in the country, and it has the most boring answer.
Social Security is not a benefit of residency. It is money you paid in, and Washington already sends it across borders as a matter of routine. The federal government's own guidance is blunt about it: “If you earned Social Security benefits, you can visit or live in most foreign countries and still receive payments.”
Where careers straddle two systems, the mechanism already exists too. The United States holds bilateral social security agreements, called totalization agreements, with about thirty governments. They let a worker combine credits earned under both systems to qualify for benefits, and stop anyone being taxed twice for the same coverage. The first of them, with Italy, entered into force in 1978. This is old administrative plumbing, running since the 1970s.
The sums are large. Social Security Administration payments accounted for $8.0 billion, or 53.9 percent, of all federal awards directed to New Hampshire in federal fiscal year 2024. Any serious negotiation starts there, because it is the biggest thing on the table.
The Massachusetts border
Nobody in Concord has to guess how this goes, because Britain and Ireland have been running the experiment since 1922.
The Common Travel Area gives Irish and British citizens the right to live, travel, work and study in each other's country, with access to social benefits, healthcare, social housing supports, and the right to vote in certain elections. There are no routine passport controls between the two countries. It began as an understanding rather than a statute, and the Irish government states plainly that it “is not dependant on the European Union and the continuing membership of both countries.”
It survived partition, thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland, and Brexit. In May 2019 both governments signed a memorandum reaffirming it. Two countries that had every reason to close that border kept it open for a century, because the people on both sides of it needed it open.
The traffic here runs both ways, and that part is usually left out. Census figures put 82,855 New Hampshire residents working in Massachusetts, and 38,897 Massachusetts residents working in New Hampshire. Roughly a hundred and twenty thousand people cross that line to earn a living. Neither state can afford to be the one that closes it.
Passports and citizenship
No routine passport control has operated between Ireland and the United Kingdom for their own citizens in a hundred years. Border arrangements get negotiated. The hard cases in the world are the ones where one side wants the border shut.
The Guard and the Shipyard
The New Hampshire National Guard is a state institution that the federal government can call up. The arrangement is the standing one and predates any of this. At separation the question is which of the two claims ends.
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard gets discussed as a New Hampshire asset. It is not one. Despite the name, the shipyard sits on Seavey's Island in Kittery, Maine. Granite Staters have worked there for generations by crossing a state line into another state's jurisdiction, paying Maine income tax on the wages wherever they live. Maine is estimated to collect about $5.5 million a year in income tax from New Hampshire residents working at the yard.
Which makes the Shipyard an argument in the other direction. Thousands of Granite Staters already commute across a border into a different tax regime to work at a federal facility, and have done so for decades without anybody calling it a crisis.
Highway money, Medicaid, and the rest of it
The federal money is real, so here are the figures. In federal fiscal year 2024, about $14.8 billion in federal assistance and contracts were pledged for activities in New Hampshire. Medicaid ran to roughly $1.38 billion in vendor payments through the state's Department of Health and Human Services. Highway infrastructure and surface transportation block grants came to about $153.7 million. Pell Grants brought $408.5 million to the state's colleges.
None of that arrives from nowhere. New Hampshire sends the money that funds it, and it sends almost exactly as much as it gets back. It deserves a page of its own.
Federal jobs
About 9,095 federal jobs were based in New Hampshire in 2024, and roughly 19,000 New Hampshire residents told the Census in 2023 that they worked for the federal government, about 2.5 percent of employed residents. Average federal salary in the state was about $102,804.
Those are real jobs held by real neighbors. The number is knowable and it is not enormous, and every country that has ever separated from another has had this conversation. A transition with a cost attached is a different kind of problem from an unanswerable one.
Taxes
New Hampshire has no individual income tax on wages or salaries and no state sales tax. The interest and dividends tax, the last individual income tax standing, was repealed effective 1 January 2025. The state funds itself mostly through property tax, which carries a 1.50 percent effective rate on owner-occupied housing, along with business taxes at a flat 7.50 percent.
Independence does not protect that arrangement, and this site claimed it did until recently. Independence is not what holds it up. Concord decides New Hampshire's tax structure and always has. A General Court could introduce an income tax next session, in the union or out of it, and no arrangement with Washington would stop it.
What separation would change is the other half of the bill. Federal income tax would no longer be collected here, and the functions Washington currently pays for here would have to be paid for by New Hampshire or not carried out. Those two numbers are close to each other. The next page sets out how close, and it is why this question turns on who decides rather than on how much is left over.
What none of this settles
Every answer above is a precedent, not a promise. Panama's currency arrangement is not New Hampshire's. The Common Travel Area was negotiated by two governments that wanted it. Totalization agreements exist because two treasuries sat down and wrote them.
Each of these questions gets raised as though it were unanswerable, and each one has in fact been answered, more than once, by countries with less in common than New Hampshire and the United States. The work is ordinary diplomatic work. What is missing is a mandate, and a mandate comes from a vote.
Sources
- Sovereign countries using the US dollar, and the dates of adoption: International use of the U.S. dollar.
- Social Security paid to people living outside the United States: USAGov, Getting Social Security benefits if you are living outside the U.S.
- Totalization agreements, what they do and who holds them: SSA, U.S. International Social Security Agreements, and IRS, Totalization agreements. The Italy agreement, signed 23 May 1973 and in force 1 November 1978, was the first: US Government Accountability Office.
- Federal funding to New Hampshire, the Social Security share, Medicaid, highway and Pell figures, and federal employment: New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, Federal Funding and Employment in New Hampshire.
- The Common Travel Area, its start date, the rights it carries, and its independence from EU membership: Citizens Information (Ireland), Common Travel Area between Ireland and the UK.
- Commuting flows, both directions: United States Census Bureau, County-to-County Commuting Flows, 5-Year American Community Survey 2016 to 2020, Table 1. New Hampshire residence counties to Massachusetts workplace counties, and the reverse, summed.
- Portsmouth Naval Shipyard's location, workforce and the Maine income tax paid by New Hampshire residents working there: Citizens Count, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
- New Hampshire's tax structure and the repeal of the interest and dividends tax: Tax Foundation, New Hampshire.
If anything on this page is wrong, tell us at hello@nhexitnow.org and we will correct it and say that we did.