Is there a federal energy tax credit for New Hampshire homeowners in 2026?

No. The 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit expired on December 31, 2025 under the One Big Beautiful Bill. It covered 30% of project cost with an annual ceiling of $3,200, made up of up to $2,000 for a qualifying heat pump and up to $1,200 for everything else. Nothing placed in service during 2026 qualifies. New Hampshire homeowners still have NHSaves, which is a utility rebate rather than a tax credit, and it pays at the point of installation instead of at filing.

What did the 25C credit actually cover besides heat pumps?

More than most coverage suggested. Exterior windows and skylights carried a $600 annual cap, exterior doors $250 each to a $500 annual maximum, and a home energy audit $150. Insulation, air sealing and electrical panel upgrades sat inside the shared $1,200 general cap. That breadth is why the expiry touched window and door installers, insulation crews and electricians, not only HVAC contractors.

Did New Hampshire permit filings drop after the credit expired?

Not in our file. Across Concord, Hampton, Exeter and Seabrook, permits describing work the credit used to subsidise numbered 857 from January through August 2026, against 821 in the same eight months of 2025. Five of the six categories were flat or higher. Exterior doors were the exception, falling from 106 to 86 on a small base. These are four towns rather than the whole state, so treat it as evidence rather than proof.

Was there a rush to install before the December 31, 2025 deadline?

Our data shows no rush. In November and December 2025, the two months immediately before the credit lapsed, these categories made up 17.9% of all New Hampshire filings we hold. The January to August 2025 baseline was 16.5%. That gap is a rounding difference on 845 records, not a deadline surge. If homeowners were racing to place systems in service, it did not reach the permit record.

Which New Hampshire permit type catches this work?

Electrical, by volume and by coverage. Of the 2,062 permits in our file describing work the credit once subsidised, 741 are electrical and they appear in all four towns. Building permits account for 690 and skew heavily to Hampton. Mechanical carries 337 and every one of them is Concord, so filtering on mechanical alone searches a single town and discards the rest.

New Hampshire Energy Tax Credit 2026: What Actually Changed

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed August 29, 2026 · Optimal window: Weeks 1–4

The federal 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit expired on December 31, 2025, and nothing installed in a New Hampshire home during 2026 qualifies for it. The trade press spent last autumn predicting the demand cliff that would follow. In the four New Hampshire towns we index, it did not arrive: permits describing the work that credit used to subsidise numbered 857 from January through August 2026, against 821 in the same eight months of 2025.

That is a 4.4% increase in the categories that were supposed to fall off.

TL;DR

Federal 25C expired December 31, 2025, taking heat pump, window, door, insulation and panel credits with it.
In our four New Hampshire towns those categories filed 857 permits in 2026, against 821 in 2025.
November and December 2025 showed no deadline rush: 17.9% of filings against a 16.5% baseline.
NHSaves is now the incentive that matters in New Hampshire, and it has its own deadline.

What exactly expired on December 31, 2025?

The 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, ended by the One Big Beautiful Bill. It refunded 30% of qualifying project cost against a taxpayer's federal return, up to $3,200 in a single tax year.

That ceiling had two halves, and the second half is the one most coverage skipped. Up to $2,000 was available for a qualifying heat pump. A separate $1,200 general cap covered everything else, and inside it sat exterior windows and skylights at $600, insulation and air sealing, and electrical panel upgrades. Exterior doors ran on their own line at $250 per door to a $500 annual maximum. A home energy audit was worth $150.

So this was never only an HVAC story. A window installer in Hampton, an insulation crew in Concord and an electrician replacing a service panel in Exeter were all selling against the same federal ceiling, and all three lost it on the same night.

The binding test was "placed in service," not contract signed and not deposit taken. A system commissioned on January 2, 2026 got nothing, whatever the paperwork said.

Did the expiry actually dent New Hampshire demand?

If homeowners had raced to beat it, November and December 2025 should be the loudest months in the file. They are among the quietest.

Across all four towns, work in these categories made up 17.9% of every permit filed in those two months. The January through August 2025 baseline was 16.5%. On 845 records that difference is noise, not a stampede. Raw counts tell the same story: 151 filings across the two deadline months, against a 2025 monthly average of roughly 103.

The honest reading is that a tax credit claimed months later, capped at $3,200, and requiring a completed installation was too weak and too slow a lever to reorder a New Hampshire homeowner's autumn. Heating season and contractor availability set that calendar. The IRS did not.

Which makes the absence of a 2026 hangover unsurprising. There was no pull-forward to pay back.

Category by category, five of six were flat or higher after the credit died. Here is the full cut, comparing the same eight months in each year so the partial 2026 does not distort it.

Category	Old 25C cap	Jan–Aug 2025	Jan–Aug 2026	Change
Electrical panel / service	Within $1,200	202	204	+1.0%
Water heaters	Up to $2,000	170	208	+22.4%
Heat pumps	Up to $2,000	164	169	+3.0%
Windows	$600	143	151	+5.6%
Exterior doors	$250 each, $500 max	106	86	−18.9%
Insulation / air sealing	Within $1,200	36	39	+8.3%
Total	$3,200 ceiling	821	857	+4.4%

Water heaters grew fastest, which fits a replacement market driven by equipment failure rather than by incentive. Nobody schedules a water heater around a tax return.

Exterior doors are the one genuine decline, and it deserves a caveat rather than a theory. Eighty-six records is a small base, a swing of twenty filings moves the percentage a long way, and door work is the category most likely to be folded into a general building permit without ever naming a door. Do not build a 2027 forecast on it.

Which New Hampshire permit types carry this work?

Electrical, first and by a clear margin. Of the 2,062 permits in our file describing work the credit once subsidised, 741 are electrical, and electrical is one of the few types recorded in Concord, Hampton, Exeter and Seabrook alike.

Building permits carry 690, but they skew hard to Hampton, which files 463 of them. Mechanical carries 337, and every single one is Concord, because Concord is the only town in our file that issues a separate mechanical permit at all. Plumbing adds 243.

The practical consequence is a trap we keep watching people walk into. Filter New Hampshire heat pump or panel work by mechanical permit and you have quietly restricted yourself to one town while concluding the Seacoast is dead. The same logic governs every trade filter here, and it is worth understanding how New Hampshire permit records change from town to town before you build any query at all.

Where do the contractor and owner names sit?

In the Seacoast, and nowhere else.

All 980 named contractors and all 1,089 named owners in this set come from Hampton, Exeter and Seabrook. Exeter is close to complete, naming a contractor on 186 of its 187 records. Hampton names an owner on all 739 of its filings. Concord contributes 939 records, nearly half the total, and names nobody on any of them, across every permit type it issues.

That is a recording practice, not evidence of unpermitted or unlicensed work. Concord logs the job and not the parties. It also means the two halves of our New Hampshire file do different jobs: Seacoast records support direct outreach, and Concord records support territory mapping. Confusing the two produces a call list that is half empty and a map that looks broken.

A permit is a signal about the homeowner, not about the contractor, and in Concord that signal arrives without a name attached to either.

When should you work this, and what is the tax-season hook?

Now through the first quarter of 2027, for a reason that has little to do with the credit itself.

Homeowners who installed qualifying equipment during 2025 will file for the credit one final time on their 2025 return. Homeowners who installed during 2026 will discover at that same moment that they get nothing. Accountants deliver that news between February and April 2027, and the question that follows is always the same: is there anything else.

There is, and it is a better answer than the one that just expired. NHSaves pays at installation rather than at filing, which removes the wait and the tax-liability requirement that made 25C useless to plenty of households. It is delivered by Eversource, Liberty, Unitil and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, and it runs on an install deadline of December 30, 2026 with forms postmarked by January 30, 2027.

For window, door and insulation work specifically, the windows and doors buyer playbook covers how that cohort behaves once an envelope job is already permitted.

What to say in your outreach

Lead with the correction, not the loss.

Most homeowners still believe some version of the federal credit survived, because most of the web still says so. Being the person who tells them plainly that 25C ended December 31, 2025, that 2026 installs do not qualify, and that NHSaves is still open and still paying, is worth more than any discount you could offer in the same sentence.

Do not open with sympathy about a lost subsidy. The filing data says these buyers never depended on it. Treating a homeowner as a bargain hunter who lost their bargain invites a price objection that was not there a moment earlier.

Where a permit already names an owner, as it does on 739 Hampton records, you are reaching a person whose project is underway and whose incentive paperwork may still be unfiled. Where it names only an address, as in all 939 Concord records, you are mapping a neighbourhood rather than dialling a number. Both are useful. They are not the same play, which is the distinction permit data and bought lead lists part company over.

For HVAC specifically, the HVAC contractor playbook sets out the trigger windows this work tends to follow.

How permits.llc fits in

We hold 12,670 New Hampshire permit records across Concord, Hampton, Exeter and Seabrook, in Merrimack and Rockingham counties, running from October 2022 to within a day or two of today. That is four towns, not the whole state, and we would rather say so than round it up.

What those four towns give you is a readable answer to a question nobody else is answering with data: whether the end of a federal credit actually moved New Hampshire homeowners. On this evidence it did not.

Pull the records yourself from the New Hampshire permit download, or start with our New Hampshire county coverage to see exactly which towns sit behind those numbers before you commit to a territory.