Business NH Magazine

Emily and Liam Couture with their garden in Lydeborough. (Credit: KIERA MCLAUGHLIN/Ledger-Transcript) If you find yourself in Lyndeborough traveling down a winding dirt road with the sun peeking through the giant trees lining the street, you will most likely discover a magical residence home to Wee Beastie Bakery.

Fishing guide Mike Blatt takes a group of summer fishing day campers out on Lake Sunapee to catch lake trout in Sunapee, N.H., on Wednesday, June 24, 2026. Blatt started guiding full-time in 2022 and now spends five weeks of his summers running fishing camps for kids. (JAMES M. PATTERSON / Valley News) After working in restaurants for most of his life, Ed Reposa was looking for something different.

Published Thursday Jul 16, 2026 Author Compiled by Matthew J. Mowry Issue: June 2026 $4 billion In NH, construction contributed $4 billion (3.4%) of the state’s GDP of $125 billion in 2025. 5,600 Number of construction business locations in NH in 2024. $820 million Private nonresidential construction spending in NH totaled $820 million in 2024. State and local construction spending totaled $867 million.

Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in office vacancies, real estate brokers say NH’s office market seems to be stabilizing, as companies adapt to more flexible work and vacant offices are turned into apartments. Meanwhile, in the industrial market, demand remains strong for small and mid-size spaces like contractor bays, though interest in large warehouse spaces has weakened. New industrial development has also slowed amid rising construction costs.

On Friday, Gov. Kelly Ayotte vetoed the state’s latest 10-year transportation improvement plan. (Photo by Molly Rains/New Hampshire Bulletin) It was an idea decades in the making — and decades in the unraveling. In 1993, New Hampshire Executive Councilor Ray Burton unveiled the “Conway bypass”: a planned extension of Route 16 to circumvent Conway and North Conway and reduce traffic. The plan targeted congestion concerns dating back to the 1950s, according to the Conway Daily Sun.

Published Tuesday Jul 14, 2026 Author Business NH Magazine Staff Leadership and employees of Primary Bank from a 2025 event. (FIle photo) Bedford-based Primary Bank is being acquired by Hometown Financial Group, the East Hampton, Mass.-based holding company for bankESB, bankHometown, and TruNorth Bank. The Board of Trustees of Hometown Financial Group, MHC unanimously adopted a Plan of Conversion to reorganize from the mutual holding company structure to the stock holding company structure.

To understand the current challenges in the construction industry, ask Developer Steve Duprey about his hypothetical $30 hamburger. Duprey Companies recently paused plans for a country-western-themed restaurant called Dukes in Concord. “We’ve put Dukes on hold,” he says.

A simmering dispute between the owner of the Steeplegate Mall and one of its three remaining tenants, the Zoo Health Club, is slated for a jury trial this fall. In a series of court filings, Onyx Partners argues that the gym has long been in violation of its lease. The gym’s owner argued Onyx is using a bad-faith argument to get his business out of the space to save money and effort on the redevelopment project.

When Annette Carbonneau thinks about the challenges of rural health care, she thinks about an 83-year-old woman from Colebrook who lost her Medicaid coverage two years ago. Suffering from arthritis, the woman struggled to fill out her Medicaid paperwork and her renewal was denied. She couldn’t afford to pay out-of-pocket on the $813 per month she got from Social Security and started postponing medical care.

Published Monday Jul 13, 2026 Author Weldon Bosworth, NH Bulletin For nearly two decades, New Hampshire has studied the Fish and Game Department’s funding and governance problems, identified practical solutions, and then failed to implement them. The department’s current financial crisis was not inevitable — it was both predictable and preventable.