It’s common knowledge that lots of people moved to New Hampshire during the pandemic to escape city life and lockdowns. A new analysis shows that they brought a lot of money with them.

“Households migrating to New Hampshire during the pandemic earned an average of $111,000, compared to $87,000 for households leaving the state,” wrote Ken Johnson of the Carsey School of Public Policy at UNH. The result, he wrote, was a lot of new Granite State income.

“In the three years prior to the pandemic, migrants to New Hampshire had collectively earned $1.1 billion more than those who left (the state). Between 2020 and 2022, this figure tripled to $3.3 billion as New Hampshire attracted higher-income migrants.”

Most of that income – $2.9 billion during the pandemic era – involved people moving up from Massachusetts.

The difference during the pandemic makes intuitive sense since COVID-19 prodded people into making a relatively quick decision to move, rather than waiting to find a new job – something that richer people are better able to do.

Vermont and Maine saw similar pandemic-era inflows, Johnson wrote: Maine gained $2.5 billion in income during the pandemic era between people leaving and arriving, while Vermont gained $1.1 billion.

For the past seven years New Hampshire’s population increase has depended entirely on people moving here, mostly from other states but increasingly from other countries. As one of the country’s oldest states, deaths here have outnumbered births since 2017.