New Hampshire Permit Records Vary by Town: 2026 Data

TL;DR

• New Hampshire's building code is statewide. Enforcement is local, so permit records differ sharply by town.
• Concord files nine permit types. Exeter files three. Filtering by trade makes whole towns look dead.
• The 2024 code concurrence period ends December 31, 2026. The 2024 editions apply from January 1.
• We index 12,278 New Hampshire permits across Concord, Hampton, Exeter and Seabrook.

New Hampshire building permit records are not comparable from one town to the next. The state writes a single building code under RSA 155-A, but each municipality decides how to enforce it and what to publish, so a plumbing job that generates its own permit record in Concord generates no separate record at all in Exeter.

That is not a data quality complaint. It is the central fact about prospecting in this state, and it breaks the most common move in permit-based outreach. Filter New Hampshire records for plumbing permits and Exeter, Hampton and Seabrook return almost nothing. Those towns are not quiet. They are recording the same work under a different label.

The reframe underneath it all still holds. A permit is a signal about the homeowner, not the contractor. Someone else pulled the permit on that Concord service upgrade. The household behind it is mid-project, already spending, and still choosing who does the next piece.

What does a New Hampshire building permit actually signal?

It signals that a specific household has committed money to changing their house recently enough to still be deciding things. The filing is the commitment, and it lands before most of the spending does.

The permit names one trade at most. It never names the whole job. A homeowner in Concord who pulls an electrical service upgrade has an electrician. They do not yet necessarily have a generator installer, an HVAC contractor for the heat pump that upgraded service was sized to run, or a landscaper to repair the trenching.

That gap is the lead. The contractor named on the permit is your competitor for one line item and your leading indicator for everything next to it.

Why do New Hampshire permit records change from town to town?

Because New Hampshire separates writing the code from enforcing it, and only the first half is statewide. RSA 155-A establishes the State Building Code, currently built on the International Building, Residential, Plumbing and Mechanical codes with New Hampshire amendments. What it does not do is put a building department in every town.

Municipal enforcement runs on a separate track. RSA 674:51 has governed a municipality's power to amend the state code and set up enforcement procedures, including appointing a building inspector and setting a permit fee schedule. That section is repealed effective July 1, 2026, part of a broader restructuring that also rewrote the statutory definition of a local enforcement agency to center on the official authorized to issue permits and make inspections.

The practical result has not changed, though the statutory plumbing around it has. Concord runs a full code administration operation with online permit filing. Exeter publishes its issued permits as monthly and weekly PDF listings under one building permit heading. Smaller towns may have a part-time inspector or no department at all. Same code, entirely different paper trail.

One more structural quirk worth knowing. New Hampshire has no state general contractor license, so a general contractor, roofer or siding installer holds no state trade license here. Electricians are licensed by the Electricians' Board under the Office of Professional Licensure and Certification, and plumbers by the Mechanical Safety and Licensing Board. The state-licensed trades are also the ones most likely to generate their own permit record in towns that bother to track them separately.

Which New Hampshire permits show up in the record?

Building permits dominate, and everything else is thinner than most people expect. Here is the actual type mix across all 12,278 New Hampshire records in our index as of August 2026.

Permit type	Share of NH records	What it front-runs
Building	62.8%	Additions, alterations, decks, roofs. Broadest signal, least specific.
Mechanical	9.2%	Heating and cooling equipment, ductwork, the heat pump conversion cohort.
Electrical	8.8%	Service upgrades, panels, EV chargers, generator hookups.
Plumbing	8.7%	Bath and kitchen work, water heaters, fixture counts implying a layout change.
Sign	4.6%	Commercial openings and rebrands. A fit-out signal, not a residential one.
Fire alarm	2.0%	Alarm and monitoring work, usually on a compliance clock.
Trench	1.5%	Driveways, drainage, service lines. Always followed by surface repair.
Demolition	1.2%	Teardowns and gut jobs. Present in all four towns, which is unusual.
Gas	1.1%	Appliance and heating conversions.

Building permits at nearly 63% is the number to sit with, and the electrical line is the tell. Electrical runs 8.8% of our New Hampshire file against 16.7% of our Massachusetts file, close to half the share. New Hampshire homeowners are not doing half as much electrical work. Fewer New Hampshire towns write it down separately.

How visible are trade permits in each town?

This is where a statewide average actively misleads you. Below is the last twelve months of New Hampshire records, August 2025 through August 2026, broken out by town.

Town	County	Records (12mo)	Permit types	Non-building share
Concord	Merrimack	4,450	9	58.5%
Hampton	Rockingham	1,530	5	6.6%
Exeter	Rockingham	794	3	1.9%
Seabrook	Rockingham	575	4	7.0%

Concord and Exeter are the two ends of it. In Concord, 58.5% of permits are something other than a building permit: 740 plumbing, 699 mechanical, 593 electrical in twelve months. In Exeter, 1.9% are, and the entire non-building total is 10 gas permits and 5 demolitions. Exeter recorded zero separate plumbing, mechanical or electrical permits in a year in which it issued 779 building permits.

No plumber should read that as an absence of plumbing work in Exeter. Read it as an absence of plumbing records.

So the operating rule splits by town:

• Concord. Filter by permit type. The trade labels are real and the volume behind them supports scoring, the kind described in measuring ROI on permit-triggered outreach.
• Hampton, Exeter, Seabrook. Ignore the permit type field and read the work description. Search the text for kitchen, bath, service, panel, furnace or addition. The trade signal is in the prose, not the category.

Getting this backwards is the single most expensive mistake available in New Hampshire permit data, and it fails silently. A trade filter across all four towns returns a clean-looking result set that is 94% Concord, and you would never see the three towns it quietly dropped. This is the difference between a running signal and a static lead list: a list does not tell you what it left out.

When should you reach out, and what changes before December 31?

Weeks 1 through 4 after the application date. The homeowner picks the follow-on trades early, and the permit filing is the earliest public moment you can act on. Work the application date rather than waiting for a decision date to confirm what you already know, the same discipline behind speed-to-lead outreach on permit data.

Two timing facts specific to New Hampshire right now.

The first is seasonal, and it is sharper here than in southern New England. Our New Hampshire file runs roughly 750 to 770 permits a month across April, May and June, and drops to roughly 410 to 440 in the depths of February. Volume nearly halves. Staffing outreach evenly across the year means overpaying for attention in February and missing the spring wave.

The second has a date on it. New Hampshire's updated State Building Code took effect July 1, 2026, with a six-month concurrence period running through December 31, 2026 during which an application may follow either the 2021 or the 2024 International Code editions. From January 1, 2027, the 2024 editions apply. Two carve-outs survived: the energy code stays at the 2018 International Energy Conservation Code, and electrical work stays on the 2023 National Electrical Code.

For anyone selling into projects that are already drawn, that concurrence window is a real conversation between now and New Year, and it expires.

What to say in your outreach

Open with the project, name the town, and skip any explanation of where you got the record. Here is a working example built from an Exeter building permit, the harder case, because the permit type tells you nothing and the description tells you everything.

Hi Mr. Doucette,

I saw a permit go through for the kitchen renovation at your place in Exeter last month. Good time of year to be doing it, better than trying to run that job in February.

One thing that catches people out on Exeter kitchen jobs: the town issues these under a single building permit, so the plumbing rough-in does not get scheduled by anyone automatically. If your GC has that covered, ignore this. If it is still an open question, the week before the cabinets land is the cheapest time to move a sink line, and about the most expensive time is the week after.

Happy to take a look and tell you if it is straightforward.

Ray Belanger Belanger Plumbing, Stratham

Three things carry that message. It names the town. It explains a real sequencing reason the homeowner can check against their own project. And it offers a no as an available answer, which is most of what separates it from the rest of that week's mail. The same structure works for the generator and standby power conversation after an electrical service upgrade in Concord.

How permits.llc fits in

We index New Hampshire permits town by town and publish what we have rather than what we wish we had. Today that is 12,278 records across Concord, Hampton, Exeter and Seabrook, covering two of New Hampshire's ten counties. Concord reaches back to October 2022. The three Rockingham County towns start in January 2025.

That is a small file next to our Massachusetts coverage, and it should be judged on freshness and fit rather than size. If you sell in these four towns it is worth real money. If you sell in Nashua or Derry, it is not worth anything to you yet, and we would rather you knew that before you spent a dollar.

Start with the free New Hampshire permit download and look at your own towns first. The New Hampshire county coverage pages show the record counts exactly as they stand, including the counties where the count is currently zero.

One thing to carry out of this. Before you filter New Hampshire permit data by trade, check how many permit types the town actually publishes. In Concord that filter is the whole tool. In Exeter it is a blindfold.