New Hampshire’s so-called ‘bathroom bill’ vetoed again, one of 29 vetoes for the year 

Gov. Kelly Ayotte has again vetoed legislation to keep transgender people out of bathrooms, sports teams, and prisons that align with their gender identity. 

The veto came as part of the final tranche of bills sent to the governor from this year’s legislative session. And it was one of three bills Ayotte blocked Wednesday. There are no more 2026 bills remaining to send to the governor’s desk, the Secretary of State’s Office said Wednesday. 

The governor also vetoed House Bill 1565, an omnibus bill that would, in part, punish people who submit false reports to the Division for Children, Youth, and Families with potential criminal penalties and lawsuits, as well as Senate Bill 475, another omnibus bill that attempted to resurrect a bill Ayotte had already vetoed exempting livestock from certain animal cruelty investigations.

This week’s actions cement the total count of bills vetoed by Ayotte at 29 — the most a governor has vetoed with their party in control of the Legislature since 1989, according to State House records.

The slew of vetoes comes as part of a wider clash between Ayotte and House and Senate Republicans over certain bills. In the past biennium, Republican lawmakers have deployed their 16-8 supermajority in the Senate and wider control of the House to pass a number of conservative bills that did not succeed in past years. And Ayotte has become comfortable opposing certain legislation, sometimes vetoing the same issue multiple times.

“This bill is nearly identical to the Senate bill I vetoed last month, as well as two other bills I have vetoed,” Ayotte wrote Wednesday in her veto message for the bathroom bill. “These bills are overly broad, poorly drafted, and create the potential for substantial litigation.”

For a fifth time

House Bill 1442 would allow business owners to separate restrooms and locker rooms by sex at birth, allow sports teams to keep transgender girls and women off female teams, and allow transgender inmates to be placed in jails or prisons corresponding with their sex at birth rather than gender identity. It doesn’t require business owners, sports teams, and jails and prisons to make these changes, but it codifies their right to do so in state law by creating exceptions to New Hampshire’s 2018 Law Against Discrimination.

HB 1442 is the latest in a long line of Republican efforts to roll back those anti-discrimination protections. Each time, however, the governor has stood in lawmakers’ way. With Wednesday’s veto, Ayotte has now thwarted four different versions of legislation, all with near verbatim text. Her predecessor, Gov. Chris Sununu, also vetoed the legislation. Each time to date, Republicans failed to secure the votes for a veto override.

The Republicans behind the bills say transgender girls and women have an unfair advantage against cisgender girls and women in sports. They have also argued that men sometimes pretend to be transgender to enter women’s locker rooms in New Hampshire.

The first time she first vetoed the legislation, Ayotte said she agrees with the sentiment of the bill, but called the legislation in front of her “overly broad and impractical to enforce, potentially creating an exclusionary environment for some of our citizens.” In an earlier veto message, she said she wants lawmakers “to address this issue in a thoughtful, narrow way while protecting the privacy, safety, and rights of all Granite Staters.” She has not publicly specified what kind of provisions would satisfy this request.

The bill is regularly lambasted by most Democrats who argue it is cruel, that it creates problems where there aren’t any, and that it is not feasible to enforce.

Meanwhile, a different piece of legislation signed into law by Sununu in 2024 bans transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has also weighed in on the issue recently. Late last month, it upheld state-level bans on transgender athletes competing in women’s and girls’ sports.

Ayotte celebrated the Supreme Court ruling, saying in a statement: “It is unfair for biological males to compete in women’s sports, and as the mom of a daughter who competed in varsity sports in high school, I am pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision today that protects women’s sports and paves the way to enforce our law in New Hampshire prohibiting men from competing in women’s sports.”

Wednesday’s veto likely ends the “bathroom bill” debate for 2026 as Republicans will almost certainly fail to convince enough Democrats to vote to override Ayotte’s vetoes. However, state Rep. Lisa Mazur, the Goffstown Republican who sponsored HB 1442, last month promised to send the same legislation to the governor for a sixth time in 2027.

“If these bills don’t pass, we’re going to bring them back next year,” Mazur told reporters at an event held before the two most recent vetos. “We’re going to keep going with this until something changes. We have to do this for our girls and our women.”

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The other vetoed bills

Ayotte’s other vetoes this year span a range of topics. 

The governor vetoed a pair of environmental bills, including:

• House Bill 221, a sweeping bill to allow electric utilities to own and operate modular nuclear reactors and expand community solar. Ayotte said she had “questions about the impact” and was in favor of a different, complex bill to allow for small nuclear reactors, House Bill 1738, which Ayotte signed Wednesday. 
• House Bill 451, requiring paint manufacturers to recycle their own paint cans, funded via a per-container assessment fee on new cans. When Ayotte vetoed it in March, she wrote “NO Sales Tax. Not now. NOT EVER!”

She blocked a key housing bill:

• House Bill 1336, to allow landlords to request another month’s rent from a new tenant as a second security deposit if that tenant had a low credit score, lack of landlord references, prior evictions, or a low income. Ayotte argued that the bill would “impede access to housing” and could lead to landlords unfairly withholding tenants’ deposits. 

In addition to SB 475, Ayotte has vetoed a number of animal bills, including:

• House Bill 1766, to differentiate livestock from domestic pets when it comes to animal cruelty laws, and prevent nonprofits from investigating suspected livestock cruelty cases. In her veto message, Ayotte wrote that the bill would hamper the ability for local law enforcement and welfare groups to respond to neglect and abuse, and put more of that burden on the state. 
• Senate Bill 535, a bill to remove the legal designation of “commercial kennels” and create a new category of breeder, a “residential breeder,” to breed cats and dogs within their primary residence and sell up to 50 per year with minimal state regulation. Ayotte argued that creating such exemptions would risk “an increase in animal abuse, neglect, and disease.”

She also vetoed two court-related bills:

• House Bill 1422, to create an exception to the three-year limit for convicts to request a new trial if new evidence is discovered. Ayotte, invoking her past career as the attorney general, argued the three-year limit is sufficient and that convicts can file a writ of habeas corpus — filed during the person’s incarceration — or writ of coram nobis — applicable after a sentence has been served — after those three years to get a new trial or plead for release. 
• House Bill 1643, a bill to prevent a guardian ad litem from making recommendations about parental custody of a child to a family court. Ayotte wrote that the current system was appropriate because the guardian ad litem is meant to represent the best interests of the child, and the judge still has the final say over custody. 

The governor blocked a slew of bills affecting public schools and local government, such as:

• Senate Bill 434, to require school districts to develop procedures to allow books and materials to be challenged and removed if they were deemed “harmful to minors.” Ayotte, who vetoed a similar bill in 2025, noted this year that existing law already allows parents to exempt their own child from material they find objectionable.
• House Bill 1358, a bill sponsored by House Majority Leader Jason Osborne to study the feasibility of transitioning all traditional state public schools to operate like public charter schools. Ayotte wrote that she supports alternative education pathways and charter schools, but that she “cannot envision a future that does not include public schools.”
• House Bill 1610, to restrict school districts from rolling over budget surpluses into the next budget without explicit, annual voter approval; if voters did not approve, the unused funds would be used to lower local property taxes. Ayotte said the bill was unworkable because it “goes into effect immediately” and would thus create a budget headache for districts that have already repurposed their unassigned funds. 
• House Bill 1267, to prevent school district attorneys and non-school staff from questioning students without parental consent. Ayotte wrote that she appreciated the intention to protect parental rights, but worried it could impede criminal investigations and public safety. 
• House Bill 1369, to repeal the requirement for municipalities to post advisories of upcoming annual town meetings in a local newspaper, and allowed them to publish the information online instead. Ayotte wrote that publishing the meetings in print is an “important part of notice” and that removing the mandate might limit public participation. “This is a step in the wrong direction for New Hampshire,” she concluded.
• House Bill 1491, to create a new opt-in, state-regulated approach for cities and towns to create public sector risk pools to help manage health care and other costs. Ayotte called the bill a “choose-your-own-regulator” approach that “dilutes necessary oversight.”
• Senate Bill 661, to increase regulation of existing public sector risk pools, allowing the Secretary of State to intervene into pools with insufficient assets and requiring the pools to hold minimum reserves. Ayotte argued the bill set arbitrary requirements and would upend existing plans. 

Ayotte vetoed a range of health care bills, including:

• House Bill 232, to expand “rights of conscience” to allow medical professionals who oppose abortion to refuse to assist in an abortion. Ayotte wrote that the bill was unnecessary because federal law already protects the right to decline to assist due to religious and moral beliefs.
• House Bill 349, to allow licensed optometrists to perform certain laser treatments. Ayotte wrote that the bill would “increase the level of risk to patients” and that such procedures should be done by physicians.
• House Bill 1337, to repeal the New Hampshire Council on Autism Spectrum Disorders. Ayotte countered that the group provides “valuable feedback” to the Division of Motor Vehicles about the needs of people with autism spectrum disorder and operates “at little to no cost to taxpayers.”
• Senate Bill 268, another so-called “bathroom bill” that sought to allow businesses and state facilities to separate bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic competitions by sex at birth. Ayotte again said the issue needed to be addressed “in a thoughtful, narrow way that protects the privacy, safety and rights of all Granite Staters.”
• Senate Bill 552, another, identical “bathroom bill” that Ayotte vetoed in June.
• Senate Bill 468, to allow the state’s alternative treatment centers — which distribute therapeutic cannabis — to operate a greenhouse cultivation location. Ayotte, a strong opponent of broader cannabis legalization, wrote simply, “I do not support expanding the cultivation of marijuana in our state.”

And she struck down a series of bills that would have imposed legislative control over the executive branch:

• House Bill 1072, to end surprise inspections of businesses by the state Department of Labor wage theft, child labor, and sanitary conditions, and require the department to give 30 days’ notice before such an inspection. Ayotte wrote that the bill “unnecessarily restricts” the department’s ability to move quickly to prevent wage theft when employees are missing paychecks. 
• House Bill 1097, requiring the Legislature have control over the installation and removal of state historical markers, which is currently handled by the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources and the Department of Transportation. Ayotte invoked the separation of powers in the state constitution and said she found “no compelling reason” to give authority over the markers to the legislative branch. 
• House Bill 1726, to, in part, require proceeds from the sale of state land to go back to the state department that purchased the land. Ayotte wrote that that was “not an efficient or fiscally prudent structure for allocating revenues.”
• Senate Bill 481, to direct proceeds from the sale of the Sununu Youth Services Center to the state’s general fund. In vetoing the bill, Ayotte argued the profits should instead be added to the Youth Detention Center Settlement Fund, from which the state must pay settlements to victims of past abuse at the facility after a class-action lawsuit. 
• Senate Bill 627, a bill to raise turnpike tolls for drivers without New Hampshire EZ-Pass transponders. Ayotte, who also vetoed the 10-year transportation improvement plan in House Bill 2026 over the same opposition, said she did so to “focus on making New Hampshire affordable to all and a destination for tourists in the region.” 

The full House and Senate will meet to take up the vetoes later this year, at a date not yet determined. Each veto requires a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers to be overturned.