Mortgage Approval and Denial Rates in Strafford County, New Hampshire (2025 HMDA)

How to read the mortgage denial rate in Strafford County numbers

Every figure on this page for Strafford County, New Hampshire is a median, not an average, which matters more than it sounds.

A median is the midpoint: half of the lending market sits above it and half below. Averages get dragged around by a handful of extreme values — one very expensive property, one unusually large loan, one graduate earning far more than their classmates — so a median is the safer number to plan against. Applications acted on of 5,250 and denial rate of 15.2%.

Use them to frame applying for a mortgage rather than to settle it. Your circumstances — credit, timing, the specific offer in front of you — move the outcome more than the local midpoint does.

What these numbers mean for buyers and refinancers judging their odds

Context does most of the work here. A number is only high or low next to something else, so we publish Strafford County, New Hampshire and how it sits inside New Hampshire against a wider benchmark on the same measure. Median loan amount of $255,000 and median applicant income of $122,000.

A difference of a few percent is inside the survey's own margin of error. A difference of a quarter or more is real, and it normally reflects the housing mix, the dominant local industries, or how much of the population is retired rather than working.

That is why a single figure should never carry a decision on its own. Read two or three measures together — what comes in, what housing costs, what is left — and the picture stops being ambiguous.

Five checks worth running first

None of this needs a spreadsheet. It needs the discipline of checking the same handful of things every time, whether you are applying for a mortgage for the first time or the fifth.

• Pull your credit file first and fix errors, because the file is what gets priced.
• Get more than one pre-approval — denial and pricing decisions vary by lender on identical files.
• Ask what the number looks like in a bad year, not an average one, and make sure the plan still holds.
• Write down the monthly number you can genuinely cover, not the maximum a lender or admissions office says you qualify for.
• Compare at least three offers. Pricing on the same product varies more between providers than most people expect, and the gap is yours to keep.
• Check the fee schedule and the fine print, not the headline rate — that is where the real cost usually hides.

How Strafford County, New Hampshire compares

Comparison is the fastest way to tell a genuinely unusual lending market from an ordinary one. We benchmark Strafford County, New Hampshire against New Hampshire and against the national picture on the same definitions, in the same period, so the difference you see is a real difference rather than an artefact of two datasets disagreeing.

Watch the denominator whenever a comparison surprises you. Whether a rate is calculated on all applications or only completed ones, on every unit or only those on the market, changes the answer more than the local market does.

Where a comparison would mislead, we leave it out instead of filling the gap. A blank means the source did not publish a reliable estimate for that lending market, and inventing one would be worse than showing less.

Common questions

Method and limitations

The page is assembled from the loan-level disclosures lenders must file each year, specifically the CFPB HMDA loan application register (2025 HMDA). Nothing here is modelled from a proprietary black box: every figure traces to a published record, and where we derive a ratio we show both inputs so the arithmetic can be checked.

Be aware of what the data cannot do. Small-area estimates are noisier than headline national ones, every source reports on a delay, and no median describes the outliers that people most often remember.

Where a source revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one rather than sitting alongside it, so the page always reflects the current official position. If you spot a number that looks wrong, it is worth telling us — corrections get made against the source record, not by guesswork.