King County incomes are at record highs — but after inflation, they peaked in 2021
The headline number keeps setting records. King County’s median household income reached $121,984 in 2024 — the highest in the SAIPE series, and up about 1% on the year in plain dollars. Pierce ($100,125) and Snohomish ($109,146) also printed nominal records.
Adjust for inflation and the picture inverts. In constant 2024 dollars, King County’s median income peaked in 2021 at about $128,000 and has fallen every year since — to $124,400, then $124,200, and now $122,000, about 4.5% below the peak. The 2024 reading is a 1.8% real decline even as the nominal figure rose: prices simply went up faster than the median paycheck. Snohomish traces the same arc from its own 2021 peak; Pierce, the late bloomer, didn’t peak until 2023 and has roughly held there.
Step back and the long sweep is two different eras. From the late-1990s through 2012, real median income in King County went nowhere — by 2012 it was about $94,000 in today’s dollars, actually below its 1997 level of roughly $100,000, with the dot-com and Great Recession downturns bracketing a lost decade and a half. Then the cloud-and-platform boom hit: real income climbed more than a third from the 2012 trough to the 2021 peak. The recent slip is small against that run, but it is the first sustained real decline since the recovery began — and with local inflation back near 5%, the 2025 estimate will have a high bar to clear.
The county ranking has barely budged. King has paid the most throughout, running about 22% above Pierce in both 1997 and 2024 — three decades of growth that lifted all three counties without rearranging them.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE), median household income, retrieved via FRED (King, Pierce, Snohomish). SAIPE are model-based single-year estimates; values are dated to the income year. Inflation adjustment uses the CPI-U (U.S. city average, all items, NSA, annual average), constant 2024 dollars. State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Economic Activity Index for Washington. SAIPE 2024 estimates were released in December 2025; the 2025 vintage is due around December 2026.