This is the follow-up blog to my previous post on Per Capita versus Per Household Personal Income to illustrate how per household income is a better metric than per capita income when comparing states. As shown in the first chart, there has been a significant decline in average household size of 35 percent to 2.7 people from 4.13 people in the United States.
Maine and New Hampshire have mirrored the overall trend, but to varying degrees. Maine’s household size was generally larger than the national average and New Hampshire from 1929 to the 1970s. By the late 1970s/early 1980s, Maine’s household size had fallen below the national average and below New Hampshire. After the 1980s, New Hampshire’s household size stabilized just below the national average while Maine’s continued to slide lower.