Where to Buy a Business in New Hampshire
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
5,403
0.5% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
383.5
#39 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
241
$178M since FY2020, 52 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Deal
$372k
FY2020 through FY2025
New Hampshire holds 5,403 businesses a searcher could realistically buy across the trades this site covers: establishments with 5 to 99 employees, big enough to have something to sell, small enough to finance. That is 0.5% of the country's buyable market and ranks New Hampshire #39 among the states. The number that decides a search, though, is not the state total but where inside the state those businesses sit.
The Deepest Counties in New Hampshire
Nobody searches New Hampshire. They search a metro they can drive across to meet an owner. These are the counties with the most buyable targets in the covered trades, Hillsborough deepest among them.
| Hillsborough | 1,487 | 27.5% |
| Rockingham | 1,388 | 25.7% |
| Merrimack | 565 | 10.5% |
| Strafford | 410 | 7.6% |
| Grafton | 393 | 7.3% |
| Carroll | 229 | 4.2% |
| Belknap | 228 | 4.2% |
| Cheshire | 226 | 4.2% |
| Sullivan | 72 | 1.3% |
| Coos | 62 | 1.1% |
What Trades Run Deepest in New Hampshire
- Full-Service Restaurants1,077 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants750 buyable
- Offices of Dentists428 buyable
- Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars369 buyable
- Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores364 buyable
- Child Day Care Services300 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in New Hampshire's SBA acquisition-lending profile. The same counts industry by industry across every state are in Where the Businesses Are, and several of these trades restrict who can own at all: the Ownership & License Rules table names which.
Next Door to New Hampshire
Nobody buys a state. These are the states New Hampshire touches, with the buyable businesses each holds in the same 29 trades.
- Massachusetts24,253 buyable
- Maine5,147 buyable
- Vermont2,421 buyable
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 29 covered trades, summed from the Census County Business Patterns (2023). A county total is a lower bound: Census suppresses cells thin enough to identify a single business, and a trade we have not written a guide for is not counted. SBA figures are change-of-ownership 7(a) approvals (FY2020 through FY2025), approvals rather than closings.