The Seattle metro unemployment rate, three decades on one line
The unemployment rate is the number everyone reaches for first, and for good reason: it compresses the whole regional labor market into a single, comparable figure — the share of people who want work and are actively looking but haven’t found it. This is the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro version, monthly, back to 1994.
Read it as a history of the region’s shocks. The line climbs into the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, climbs again through the 2008–09 financial crisis to around 9%, and then does something no prior recession did — spikes almost vertically in the spring of 2020, past 15% in a matter of weeks as the pandemic shut the economy overnight. What followed was the fastest recovery in the series: the rate fell back to a low band and has stayed there, wherever the latest month now sits on the chart.
Two reading notes. This is not seasonally adjusted, so the year-to-year sawtooth — a small bump most winters, a dip each fall — is calendar, not economic news; watch the level relative to the same month a year earlier. And an unemployment rate is a ratio, so it can fall for the wrong reason: if people stop looking for work, they leave the denominator and the rate drops without anyone getting hired. Pair this with the jobs-by-sector counts to see whether a low rate reflects real hiring or a shrinking labor force.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA MSA, via FRED series SEAT653URN. Not seasonally adjusted; percent of the labor force, dated to the first of each month. New months post about three weeks after month-end; this chart refreshes on the next daily build. State downturns shaded from FRED WAPHCI.