Child food insecurity rose 6% in New Hampshire, according to Feeding America

Child food insecurity in New Hampshire grew by more than 6% from 36,160 children in 2023 to 38,430 in 2024, the national nonprofit Feeding America found in its annual “Map the Meal Gap” report and data collection.

That means 15.5%, or roughly 1 in 6, Granite State children were food insecure in 2024. Because of delays in federal data reporting, data for 2025 and 2026 isn’t expected to be available for a few more years.

In 2024, 11.7% of all New Hampshire residents (including adults and children) were food insecure, according to the report. That’s up from 2023, when 10.7% were food insecure.

Feeding America — which, in addition to working with a nationwide network of food banks and pantries, advocates for food-related policies and researches nutrition and hunger — uses the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition of food insecurity: “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

Coös County, which encompasses New Hampshire’s rural North Country region, saw the most severe food insecurity. There, 22.1% of children and 15.4% of people overall were food insecure. For comparison, 16.3% of children and 11.1% of people overall in Hillsborough County, which includes Manchester and Nashua, were food insecure. Rockingham County, which includes the Seacoast region, has the lowest levels of insecurity at 11.6% of children and 8.8% overall.

More from this section

Coldest Augusts in New Hampshire since 1895

New Hampshire is still below the national average. Across the United States, 19.5% of children and 14.4% of people overall were food insecure, according to the report.

The delay on the data means the impact of recent changes to government food assistance programs like SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) isn’t factored in yet. In 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, an omnibus piece of legislation pushed by President Donald Trump that touches nearly every segment of the federal government.

The law reduced benefits recipients receive by restricting what factors can be taken into account when deciding a family’s allotment; capped future program funding increases at the rate of inflation; banned many migrants (specifically refugees and asylees) from participating in the program (people in the country without legal status were already ineligible); and made work requirements stricter. It also punished states with high error rates. Those provisions have been going into effect in a piecemeal schedule since the bill was enacted in July 2025.

Democrats and many working in the food insecurity field warned the bill would result in more families going hungry. Future data will likely show whether those fears are borne out.

“The Map the Meal Gap report confirms what we see every day: the struggle to put food on the table is a growing reality in every corner of the Granite State,” Elsy Cipriani, executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank, wrote in a statement about the report. “What is most heartbreaking is the toll this takes on our children.”