US Map / County Maps / New Hampshire

New Hampshire County Map

New Hampshire's counties are governed by the state representatives who happen to live in them — an arrangement found nowhere else.

The five original counties were laid out in 1769 by the colonial governor and named for his political friends in London — Rockingham, Strafford, Hillsborough, Cheshire, Grafton. The other five were cut from them between 1800 and 1840 as the state filled northward. Coos, made in 1803, still covers a fifth of the state and holds barely two per cent of its people.

The 10 counties of New Hampshire

Hillsborough and Rockingham, the two southern counties within commuting distance of Boston, hold more than half the state between them. The ten counties are the whole state, so the table below is complete.

The county convention: a legislature borrowed from the state

New Hampshire does not elect a county council. Instead the county convention — every state representative whose district lies within the county — meets as the county's legislative body, approves the budget, and sets the tax. The same people who serve in the 400-member New Hampshire House in Concord go home and appropriate the county's money. Day-to-day administration falls to three elected county commissioners, and the county also elects a sheriff, attorney, treasurer, and register of deeds.

What they administer is narrow. The 234 cities and towns run the schools, the roads, the police, and the zoning, as they have since the seventeenth century. A New Hampshire county's real business is the county jail, the registry of deeds, the sheriff's civil process, and — the largest item in almost every county budget — the county nursing home, a long-term care facility that most counties still own and operate. Hillsborough County keeps two courthouses, at Manchester and Nashua, because the county's two cities each wanted one and neither would give way.

Largest and smallest counties

Hillsborough County is the most populous at 430,462 in the 2024 estimates, 31% of the state, and contains both Manchester and Nashua. Rockingham County follows at 322,433 along the short Atlantic coast. The smallest is Coos County at 31,094 — the only New Hampshire county to have lost population in every recent census — and it is also much the largest by land area, roughly 1,800 square miles of the White Mountains and the North Woods.

The New Hampshire state page has the mountains and the coast, and the county map index has the other 49. Its neighbors: Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts, which abolished most of its county governments outright. The New England region page explains the town-first tradition behind all of it.