Best of NH: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot, eight confirmed categories, and a 2000 start date

2000. That's when New Hampshire Magazine, under Yankee Publishing, first ran Best of NH as a public readers-choice ballot. Twenty-five years later the program is still built the same way: real people vote online, category by category, at bestofnh.com. No jury picks a winner behind closed doors here.

Eight categories are confirmed for this guide: dentist, restaurant, salon, gym, realtor, contractor, martial arts, and photographer. That's a trade list, not a geography list, and it almost certainly doesn't cover every category the ballot runs. A landscaper or a bakery owner shouldn't assume exclusion just because their trade isn't in these eight; check bestofnh.com directly.

Nine weeks is short for a statewide vote. A dentist's office that waits until February to mention the ballot has already burned a third of the window. The New Hampshire contest hub lists the state's other public ballots for businesses weighing more than one entry a year.

Why eight named categories beat a category count nobody here can check

A lot of readers-choice writeups lean on a round number, "200-plus categories," to sound comprehensive. This guide doesn't have a verified total category count to cite, so it isn't going to invent one. What it does have is eight confirmed names, and that's worth more than a guessed figure.

What each confirmed category actually covers

Dentist and gym are straightforward. Realtor and contractor split the property side of the ballot, one sells homes, one builds or fixes them. Martial arts sits closer to a fitness-and-instruction category than a gym does. Photographer and restaurant round out the personal-service and hospitality end.

Treat this table as a floor, not a ceiling. Any category not on it should be confirmed on the live ballot, not assumed absent.

Reading the calendar: a nine-week vote, then a three-month wait for the party

January 12 to March 12, 2025. Nine weeks, give or take a day. That's the entire public voting window for the year's Best of NH ballot, and it's short enough that a business planning to mention it "sometime this spring" will likely miss it entirely.

Then comes the gap. Voting closed in March; New Hampshire Magazine doesn't celebrate results until the Best of NH Party on June 26 at Flag Hill Distillery. That's a little over three months of silence between the last vote and the first public confirmation of anything. A business shouldn't call itself a winner in April. It hasn't been told yet.

Nothing in the confirmed record says whether the party is where winners are first named or simply where they're celebrated after an earlier announcement. Either way, June 26 is the date worth putting on a calendar, not a guess at when a magazine issue might land on newsstands.

Best of NH next to New Hampshire's other public ballots

Best of NH isn't the only vote New Hampshire businesses or fans get asked to join. Best of Mount Washington Valley runs as a separately named, region-specific program rather than the statewide dentist-to-photographer ballot described here. A business that competes in one is not automatically in the other, and the two shouldn't get lumped together in a single marketing line.

Even further apart are New Hampshire's high school sports fan-votes. The New Hampshire High School Athlete of the Week ballot and the New Hampshire High School Baseball Player of the Week poll belong to a completely different category of contest, student athletes rather than dentists and contractors, and neither shares an organizer, a URL, or a voting window with Best of NH.

The practical upshot: a Manchester dentist's office running a Best of NH push in February and a nearby high school booster club running an Athlete of the Week push the same week are not fighting over the same pool of voters, the same platform, or the same deadline. Confusing the two in a shared announcement just muddies both asks. See the New Hampshire contest hub for the fuller list of what's running statewide.

Running an honest push around one of the eight confirmed categories

Nine weeks isn't much runway. A realtor's office or a martial arts studio building a Best of NH campaign should send the actual bestofnh.com category link, not a vague "go vote for us," and should do it early in the January-to-March window rather than in the final days.

Real customers voting for a business they already use is the whole mechanic here, nothing fancier. A stack of invented email addresses or a script filing ballots nobody actually typed puts that standing at risk on a program with 97,000-plus genuine voters behind it; no small operator's shortcut outruns a readership that size. For the general playbook behind a clean award-style push, see award vote campaigns, and restaurants entering the food category specifically may find restaurant vote campaign tactics useful for pacing reminders across a nine-week window.

What paid promotion can honestly do is put the right category link in front of more people who already know the business. It can't manufacture the 97,000 votes that decided the 2025 ballot, and it can't move the Best of NH Party date up from June 26. How online contest votes work covers that mechanic in general terms; read is buying votes legal before putting any budget behind a category push.