Most infrastructure stories in a growing city are about more: more housing, more transit, more power. Water is the exception. The Seattle regional system — the Cedar and Tolt supply that Seattle Public Utilities runs for about 1.5 million people across the metro — delivered roughly 170 million gallons a day in 1990. By 2022 it was down to about 124 even as the population it serves grew by around 44%. Total demand fell about 27% while the customer base swelled; per-person use is roughly half what it was in 1990. SPU’s own framing: the region now uses less water in total than it did in 1957.
The decline wasn’t gradual erosion so much as a step change that stuck. Demand sat on a plateau near 170 through the late 1980s, then the 1992 drought forced mandatory curtailment and broke the habit. What kept it broken was structural: the 1993 plumbing code (low-flow toilets, showerheads, and faucet aerators), progressively efficient appliances, a sustained regional conservation program, rising water rates that made waste expensive, and tighter system operations that cut leakage and reservoir overflow. Demand bottomed near 118 in 2010 and has drifted up only slightly since — into the low 120s — as population growth finally began to outrun the efficiency gains.
Why it matters beyond the utility bill: a region that added nearly half again as many people while cutting total water use has effectively manufactured new supply out of conservation, deferring the cost of new dams or bigger withdrawals — and leaving more water in the rivers, which is its own kind of dividend for the salmon. One honesty note on the chart: SPU publishes the full annual series only as a graphic, so the points plotted here are its reported figures at benchmark years, not a continuous meter read — the shape is right, the exact path between dots is SPU’s, not mine.
Source: Seattle Public Utilities — Water System Plan and annual wholesale-customer survey (Figure 9, Population & Components of Water Demand). Annual-average demand on the SPU regional supply system. SPU reports the full series only as a chart; values shown are its stated benchmark figures. Annual.
Boeing is still the Puget Sound’s largest manufacturing employer, and its monthly delivery count is the cleanest read on how busy the region’s assembly lines are. In June 2026 the company delivered 64 commercial airplanes: 50 737 MAX jets, 10 787-9 Dreamliners, three 767s, and one 777 Freighter.
Of those 64, 54 were assembled in Washington — the 737 in Renton, the 767 and 777 in Everett. The ten 787s are built in North Charleston, South Carolina, the one widebody line Boeing moved out of the region. So June’s tally is really 54 Puget Sound airplanes plus ten from the Carolinas.
June brought Boeing’s second-quarter total to 171 jets and its first-half total to 314 — up 12% from the first half of 2025 and the company’s best first half since 2018, as 737 MAX output keeps climbing back from the strike- and quality-related slowdowns of 2024. The order book stayed deep: 121 gross orders in June, 445 gross (386 net) for the half, and a backlog of 6,202 aircraft at month-end — years of work for the region’s aerospace payrolls.
The chart is why “best first half since 2018” is both true and a smaller claim than it sounds. Boeing’s January–June count collapsed twice inside six years: to 239 in 2019, when the 737 MAX was grounded that March, and to 70 in the first half of 2020, when the airlines stopped taking airplanes at all. The climb back has been anything but a straight line — 156, then 216, then 266 in 2023, then a slide to 175 in the first half of 2024 after the January door-plug blowout put a regulator’s cap on MAX output. Two strong halves have followed. But the pre-grounding plateau was 375, 352 and 378 in 2016, 2017 and 2018. At 314, Boeing is still running about 17% below its 2018 pace. This is a recovery, not a return.
One caveat on reading the chart as a Puget Sound indicator: it counts every Boeing commercial delivery worldwide, the North Charleston 787s included, because that is the only basis on which the company reports the number consistently. The first-half 314 breaks down as 243 737s, 40 787s, 16 767s and 15 777s, so 274 of the 314 — 87% — were assembled in Washington, a slightly higher local share than June’s 54-of-64 (84%). The line’s shape — grounding, pandemic, door plug, recovery — is the Renton and Everett story. Its level runs about 15% above the region’s own count.
Source: Boeing Commercial, Orders & Deliveries (monthly, company IR). June 2026 program detail via Air Data News; first-half context via CNBC. Chart series: January–June deliveries by year, hand-pulled from Boeing’s monthly O&D summaries and cross-checked against the six-month delivery tables in Boeing’s Q2 Form 10-Q filings (data/boeing-h1-deliveries.csv carries the per-year citation). Final-assembly locations: 737 (Renton, WA), 767 and 777 (Everett, WA), 787 (North Charleston, SC). Boeing reports July deliveries in mid-August.
The Case-Shiller Seattle home price index read 395.1 in May 2026 — down 1.8% from a year earlier, and 4.0× its January 2000 level. The three tiers are the part worth watching: S&P splits the metro’s repeat sales into thirds by price, and the cheapest third has pulled steadily away from the most expensive third since 2012. Case-Shiller is a three-month average reported with a two-month lag, so it is the slowest of the local price measures — and the most methodologically careful.
Source: S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Seattle Home Price Indices, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEXRNSA, tiers SEXRLTNSA / SEXRMTNSA / SEXRHTNSA). January 2000 = 100. Auto-generated each build.
The typical asking rent in the Seattle metro was $2,269 a month in June 2026, up 1.4% from a year earlier. ZORI tracks new leases, not the average rent paid across all tenants, so it turns roughly a year before the rent component of the local CPI does — which makes it the leading indicator of the two. Nominal dollars.
Source: Zillow Research, Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, smoothed, all homes plus multifamily, nominal dollars. Auto-generated each build.
The Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue labor force — everyone employed or actively looking for work — was 2,288,170 in June 2026, down 1.1% from a year earlier. It’s the head-count denominator under the unemployment rate: a labor force that grows with population and participation. Not seasonally adjusted.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA civilian labor force, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED SEAT653LFN. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle sells itself as a tech town — Amazon, Microsoft, a cloud on every résumé. But payrolls tell a stubborner story. In May 2026 the Information sector — software, publishing, telecom, the closest thing the official data has to “tech” — employed 131,200 people across the metro. Manufacturing, which here is overwhelmingly Boeing and its aerospace supply chain, employed 165,800. Aerospace still out-hires tech by about 35,000 jobs, and despite thirty-six years of Seattle becoming synonymous with software, these two lines have never crossed.
They have, however, spent a generation closing. In 1990 it wasn’t close: manufacturing employed 232,800 and Information just 34,500 — a gap of nearly 200,000. Information then climbed almost without interruption for three decades, the Microsoft-then-Amazon ascent, peaking near 151,200 in June 2022. Since then it has fallen for three straight years to 131,200, off about 13% from that peak — the local fingerprint of the 2023–2025 tech retrenchment. Manufacturing ran the opposite way: down about a third from its 246,500 high in 1998, with the violent single-month notches — 1995, 2005, 2008, and again in October 2024 — marking Boeing machinist strikes, visible because the series isn’t seasonally adjusted. The 2024 strike alone dropped the line to 137,700 before it snapped back.
The right edge is the surprise. Over the past year the town’s identity and its payroll data point in opposite directions: tech was flat (Information −0.1% year over year) while aerospace grew (manufacturing +1.6%), lifting the sector off its strike-year floor. So the convergence that looked inevitable for thirty years has stalled — not because tech overtook aerospace, but because aerospace stopped falling and tech stopped rising. Whether the crossover ever happens now depends less on Amazon than on Boeing’s order book.
One caveat on the labels. There is no clean monthly “aerospace” series for the metro, so this uses total manufacturing as the stand-in; in the Seattle MSA that is a fair proxy — aerospace dominates the sector — but it also sweeps in a tail of food, shipbuilding, and other production. “Information” likewise undercounts tech, since plenty of software work is booked under professional services. The levels are proxies; the shapes — one sector cresting and rolling over, the other grinding down and flattening — are the real story. For the fuller sector picture, see the jobs-by-sector breakdown.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment (CES), Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue WA MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED — Manufacturing and Information. Thousands of jobs, dated to the first of the month. New months post about three weeks after month-end; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
The Ports of Seattle and Tacoma compete no longer: in 2015 they merged their marine-cargo operations into The Northwest Seaport Alliance (NWSA), which since then reports the two harbors as one gateway. So this is a single combined line — there is no public Seattle-versus-Tacoma container split after 2015.
NWSA handled 2,418,534 international TEUs in 2025, down 7.3% from 2024. That is the second-lowest annual total since the 2015 merger — above only the 2.24 million trough of 2023 — and it leaves container volume 22% below the 2018 peak of 3.11 million and 13% below where it stood in 2015.
The shaded band marks Washington’s only economic contraction of the period, the early-2020 COVID downturn. Unlike the city’s population, the docks felt it: international volume dropped 13.8% in 2020. It then snapped back in the 2021 import boom to 2.99 million, before three of the next four years moved lower as imports normalized and 2025’s tariff pressure and elevated retail inventories cut into the full-container trade.
Splitting the loaded boxes apart shows two different stories.
Full imports have held in a 1.1–1.5 million band: they spiked to 1.46 million in the 2021 import boom, then unwound, falling 10.3% in 2025 to 1,157,002. Full exports have done something more durable — drifted down for a decade, from a 2016 peak of 984,274 to 605,126 in 2025 (−4.9% on the year), a 39% slide from that peak. The result: the gateway’s import-to-export ratio has widened from 1.5 in 2015 to 1.9 today, and in recent years NWSA now ships back more empty boxes than it fills with exports.
Two caveats on the number. It counts international containers only — full imports, full exports, and empties — and excludes domestic Alaska and Hawaii traffic of roughly 0.73 million TEU a year; including it, NWSA’s 2025 grand total was about 3.16 million, down 5.5% on the year. And because the ports report jointly, the long Seattle-versus-Tacoma rivalry that ran through the 1990s and 2000s can no longer be drawn as two lines.
Legal cannabis arrived in Washington in July 2014. In today’s dollars, sales went almost straight up for six years — from $49M in the first quarter to a peak of $481M in 2020 Q3 — and have been sliding ever since. The latest reading, $265M in 2026 Q1, is 45% below that peak and down 7.2% from a year earlier. (All figures here are inflation-adjusted to constant 2026 dollars; in unadjusted dollars the peak was a smaller-looking $381M and the drop from it about 31%.)
The 2020 spike was real: cannabis was deemed essential, stores stayed open, and stuck-at-home demand pushed real sales up about 27% year-over-year. The shaded band marks Washington’s only economic contraction inside this window — the 2020 COVID downturn — and cannabis is the rare series that climbed straight through it. But the boom didn’t outlast the pandemic. In real terms, annual sales peaked at $1.81 billion in 2020 and have fallen every year since, to $1.16 billion in 2025.
That is the real story: adjusted for inflation, Washington’s cannabis market has shrunk year-over-year for 20 straight quarters — every quarter since spring 2021. Nominal dollars hide it, because rising prices flatter the recent numbers; the unadjusted series is “only” down about 31% from peak. Falling retail dollars also understate what’s moving off the shelf — Washington’s per-gram cannabis prices have dropped sharply since 2014, so the state is almost certainly selling far more product for that shrinking pile of money.
One structural break is worth flagging. Through mid-2016 the series blends two channels: licensed I-502 recreational stores and medical “collective gardens.” The Cannabis Patient Protection Act shut the collectives down on July 1, 2016, folding medical patients into the licensed retail system — which is why the early-2016 composition shifts even as the total keeps climbing.
Across nearly twelve years, Washington’s legal market has rung up about $14.7 billion in retail sales measured in today’s dollars (roughly $12.3 billion unadjusted).
Source: WA Department of Revenue, “Recreational and medical cannabis taxes” — Estimated Sales Tax Collected on Sales of Cannabis (XLSX), quarterly total retail value before tax, prepared by DOR’s Research & Fiscal Analysis Division. Deflated to constant 2026 dollars using CPI-U, U.S. city average, all items, NSA (BLS: CUUR0000SA0). The 37% cannabis excise tax is administered by the WA Liquor and Cannabis Board. Quarterly; DOR states each quarter is static and not revised. Next update: DOR posts 2026 Q2 in roughly August 2026.
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.
The Seattle metro economy — King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties — produced $488 billion of real output in 2023, the most recent year the Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes for metro areas. That is up 6.2% from 2022, which the BEA ranked as the fastest growth of any U.S. metro with more than 1.5 million people (Houston was next, at 5.4%). Information and tech alone generated $133.7 billion of it.
Real output has grown 2.4-fold since 2001, from $205 billion. The line bends upward after 2016: the cloud-and-Amazon stretch of 2017–2019 added real growth of 8.2%, 7.5%, and 5.5% in consecutive years, the strongest run in the series.
What stands out against the shaded bands is how little the contractions bit. The 2001 dot-com bust — which hit tech towns hard — left Seattle’s real GDP essentially flat (about +0.1% in both 2001 and 2002) rather than shrinking. The only outright annual decline in twenty-three years came in 2009, down 3.4% in the Great Recession, and it was erased by 2011.
The pandemic is the real tell. Most metros’ output fell in 2020; U.S. real GDP dropped about 3.5% that year. Seattle’s rose 0.2% — flat, but on the right side of zero — because the things that power this economy (cloud services, software, e-commerce logistics) were precisely the things that boomed while people stayed home. Growth then resumed at 7.4% in 2021.
Two caveats. This is real GDP in chained 2017 dollars, so the doubling is genuine output growth, not inflation; in current dollars the 2023 figure is a larger-looking $566.7 billion. And 2023 is the end of the line: the BEA has discontinued its metropolitan-area GDP series, so there is no official 2024 or 2025 metro number to add — only the underlying county estimates, released on a lag.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP by Metropolitan Area (real GDP, all industries, chained 2017 dollars), accessed via FRED series RGMP42660 (real) and NGMP42660 (nominal). Geography: Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA MSA (CBSA 42660 = King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties). The “fastest among large metros” ranking and the $133.7B tech/information figure are from BEA’s December 4, 2024 release, as reported by Axios Seattle. State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Economic Activity Index for Washington via FRED. Annual; BEA released 2023 metro estimates in December 2024 and has since paused MSA-level publication.
Measured against the district’s own October headcount, real spending per pupil climbed from about $16,500 in 2011–12 to $24,286 in 2024–25 (constant 2025 dollars) — roughly a 47% real increase, driven by the post-McCleary funding surge of the mid-2010s, with growth cooling since.
The shaded band is where the two independent sources overlap (2019–20 through 2022–23). At both ends of that window they agree almost exactly — within 0.4% in 2019–20 and 0.5% in 2022–23. In between, the federal NCES “current spending” line jumps 6–8% above the state’s ESSA-based line: that’s the wave of pandemic ESSER relief, which the NCES measure books in full while OSPI’s ESSA figure excludes part of it. By 2022–23, with relief winding down, the two reconverge. It’s a clean illustration that which spending definition you use matters most exactly when a one-time funding shock hits. (Y-axis starts at $14,000.)
The two measures, and why use both:
NCES current expenditures ÷ SPS headcount. Federal F-33 operating expenditures (Urban Institute through 2019–20, U.S. Census Bureau for 2020–21 to 2022–23), over SPS’s October count. Plus: a standardized, nationally comparable definition with a long back-run; the two F-33 sources match within 0.2% where they overlap. Minus: still released with a lag (ends 2022–23), and it fully books one-time federal surges like ESSER.
OSPI total expenditures ÷ SPS headcount. Washington’s ESSA expenditure total over the same headcount. Plus: state-official and current through 2024–25. Minus: ESSA accounting excludes some spending (so it understates the ESSER years), and it only begins in 2019–20.
Using SPS headcount as the common denominator (rather than NCES fall membership or OSPI’s annual-average FTE) raises the per-pupil figure by roughly 3% and is the most locally meaningful count — but it’s why this view starts in 2011–12, the first year of consistent district headcount.
Sources: NCES Common Core of Data district finance survey (F-33), current expenditures, via the Urban Institute (through 2019–20) and the U.S. Census Bureau School System Finances API (2020–21 to 2022–23); OSPI ESSA per-pupil expenditure (total expenditures, data.wa.gov, 2019–20 to 2024–25); both divided by SPS October headcount. Deflated by BLS CPI-U (annual average). Overlap agreement: 2019–20 +0.4%, 2022–23 +0.5%; pandemic years 2020–21 +8.1%, 2021–22 +6.1%. Annual; OSPI posts the new school year each winter (2025–26 expected early 2027).
Enrollment peaked at 53,627 students in 2019–20, then fell sharply over the next two years. By 2024–25 the district counted 49,240 — down about 4,400 students, or 8%. It has roughly leveled off since 2022–23.
Source: Seattle Public Schools, Annual Enrollment Reports (October headcount). Annual; the 2025–26 count is expected in the next report, typically released the following spring/summer.
For four years the defining fact of the King County housing market was scarcity: inventory fell to a low of 746 active listings in January 2022, and bidding wars followed. That era is over. At the end of June 2026 there were 6,913 homes for sale — the highest count in the decade Realtor.com has tracked the county, the fourth straight month to set a series record, and 19% more than a year earlier.
Inventory is seasonal — it builds through spring and summer, thins in winter — so the cleaner signal is the year-over-year climb, which has now run for several spring seasons. Supply is rebuilding faster than demand: the Northwest MLS put the county at roughly 3.4 months of inventory in May, still under the four- to-six months most consider balanced, but the loosest in years. The permit pipeline turning back up suggests more supply behind it.
Prices have not followed inventory down by much. The median list price was $850,000 in June 2026 — off 4% from a year earlier and about 10% below the $949,248 peak of May 2022, but still roughly 50% above where the series began in 2016.
The market’s pace has settled rather than seized: the median listing sits 37 days before going under contract, about the same as a year ago and a week slower than two springs back. More homes, on the market a little longer, with prices drifting down — a buyer’s market by the standards of the last decade, even if it would not have looked like one in 1995.
Two caveats on the source. First, these are list prices from active listings, not closed-sale prices: for the actual transacted figure, the Northwest MLS reported a King County median sale price of $875,000 in May 2026 — close to the list-price line, and the number to cite when a local sale price is needed. We chart the Realtor.com/FRED listing series because it is clean, current, and free to republish with attribution; NWMLS’s own statistics carry terms that restrict derivative charts. Second, this chart is nominal — unlike the blog’s usual inflation-adjusted dollar charts — because list prices are the number buyers and sellers actually negotiate; in real terms the pullback from the 2022 peak is larger.
Source: Realtor.com Residential Listings for King County, WA (FIPS 53033), via FRED — active listings, median list price, median days on market. Closed-sale figures: Northwest MLS Monthly Market Snapshot (May 2026). State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Index for Washington. Monthly; FRED posts each month’s figures early the following month, and this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
Thirty-six years ago, the Seattle metro economy was a manufacturing town: Boeing and its suppliers employed about 233,000 people in 1990, while the Information sector — software, publishing, telecom, the bucket that holds “tech” — was a rounding error at 34,500. Those two lines have spent a generation converging, and a third, leisure and hospitality, has quietly passed them both.
The story in one chart. Manufacturing (the Boeing cycle) has lost about a third of its 1990 workforce, sliding to 165,800 by May 2026; the violent single-month notches in 1995, 2005, 2008, and again in October 2024 are machinist strikes, visible because this series is not seasonally adjusted. Information climbed almost without interruption for thirty years — the Microsoft-then-Amazon ascent — peaking near 151,000 in mid-2022. It then fell for three consecutive years to the low 130s, off roughly 13% from that peak: the local fingerprint of the 2023–2025 tech retrenchment. Leisure and hospitality took the hardest pandemic hit of any sector, collapsing from about 202,000 to 114,400 in a single month in spring 2020, but it has not only recovered — at a record 208,200 it is now the largest of these four, having overtaken a diminished manufacturing sector around 2015. Construction remains the cyclical one, up from 71,000 in 1990 to 120,900 but well off its 2022 high as higher rates bit — the permit slump made flesh.
Year over year the picture matches the stalled total: payrolls were 2.14 million in May 2026, flat on the year. Manufacturing (+1.6%) and leisure (+1.2%) edged up, construction fell 1.3%, and information was essentially unchanged (−0.1%) — which, after three years of decline, is itself a kind of news: the tech slide has stopped, at least for now.
A note on the construction line: FRED discontinued the seasonally-adjusted Seattle-MSA construction series at the end of 2024, so this is the mining, logging, and construction supersector, not seasonally adjusted. In this metro, mining and logging are negligible, so the line reads as construction.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment (CES), Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED — Information, Manufacturing, Mining/Logging/Construction, Leisure & Hospitality, Total nonfarm. State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Index for Washington. Monthly, about three weeks after month-end; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
This is the region’s whole economic story on one line: 1.27 million jobs in 1990, 2.12 million now — the metro economy adding two-thirds again to its payrolls while the population grew to match. Every shock is legible. The dot-com flatline. The 2008–09 slide. The 2020 cliff — a quarter-million jobs gone in three months — followed by the fastest recovery on the chart. Even the October 2024 Boeing machinist strike shows up, a 44,000-job notch that snapped back the next month.
The right edge is the news, and the news is stillness. April’s count of 2,120,100 was up just 1,800 jobs — 0.1% — from a year earlier. Outside of recessions, this series simply doesn’t do that: year-over-year growth ran 2–3% through the 2010s and stayed positive even through the 2018–19 trade jitters. A flat year with unemployment still low reads as an economy at stall speed — not shedding workers, not hiring either. Whether that resolves into a downturn or a reacceleration is exactly what the next few months of this chart will show.
One reading note. The series is not seasonally adjusted, so the correct comparison is always to the same month a year ago — the annual sawtooth (summer peaks, January dips) is calendar, not economics. The NSA peak of 2,146,900 last June will likely be tested this summer; whether 2026 clears it is the cleanest single test of whether the stall is ending. For which industries are doing the stalling, see the jobs-by-sector breakdown.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Area Employment, Hours, and Earnings (CES), total nonfarm, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED series SEAT653NAN. Thousands of jobs, dated to the first of the month. New months post about three weeks after month-end; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
The average private-sector worker in the Seattle metro earned $47.70 an hour in May, up 6.8% from a year earlier — nominal wage growth that would have been front-page news any time in the 2010s. The teal line tells that story: pay up better than 50% since 2011, accelerating since late 2024.
The gray line tells the other one. Run the same series in today’s dollars and the average wage peaked in February 2019 at $52.55, was ground down 17% by the 2021–23 inflation to a trough of $43.42 in March 2024, and has since clawed back about 10%. Even after two years of unusually strong real gains — nominal growth near 7% against inflation near 4–5% — the average hour of work still buys about 9% less than it did in early 2019. That’s the whole inflation era in one picture: the raise arrived, and the register took it.
The caveats here are load-bearing, so read them. This is an average, not a median — it moves when the workforce changes shape, not just when anyone gets a raise. Some of the 2019 peak is exactly that: a tech-heavy boom pushing the mix upward, and some of the 2021 sag is low-wage hiring coming back. It’s also not seasonally adjusted and covers only private employees, and the series only begins in 2011. Direction and rough magnitude are trustworthy; any single month, less so. Pair it with the unemployment rate to see whether pay gains are coming from a tight labor market or a shrinking one.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Area Employment, Hours, and Earnings (CES), average hourly earnings of all employees, total private, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED series SMU53426600500000003. Real line deflated by U.S. CPI-U (CPIAUCNS) to the latest month. New months post about three weeks after month-end; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
Consumer prices in the Seattle area rose 4.9% over the year through April — the fastest local inflation since November 2022, and the fifth straight reading to come in hotter than the last. The acceleration has been remarkably steady: 2.7% last June, 2.8% in August, 3.1% in December, 3.9% in February, 4.9% now. The U.S. rate is on the same escalator a step behind — 4.2% through May, up from 2.4% as recently as February.
Two things are true at once on this chart. First, the 2026 upturn is a national story with an energy signature — gasoline at record nominal prices does a lot of the lifting, just as it did in 2008 and 2022. Second, Seattle runs hot: the local line has sat above the national one for most of the past decade, it peaked higher in 2022 (10.1% vs 9.1%), and the current gap is about a point. Housing costs are the usual suspect in that persistent premium.
Reading notes, because this series has quirks. BLS surveys Seattle prices bimonthly — even months only — so the local line has half the resolution of the national one, and one recent point is simply missing (October 2025, a casualty of the federal shutdown). Both series are not seasonally adjusted, which is why we compare each month to the same month a year earlier rather than to the month before. And a city CPI measures price change within Seattle, not whether Seattle is cheaper or dearer than elsewhere — it answers “how fast,” never “how much.”
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U, all items, not seasonally adjusted — Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue (FRED CUURA423SA0) and U.S. city average (FRED CPIAUCNS). The June reading for both series lands with the CPI release in mid-July; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
Seattle’s average pump price for regular unleaded hit $5.90 a gallon in May — the highest monthly figure in the 48 years BLS has tracked it, back to 1978, past the old record of $5.60 from June 2022. The run-up was violent: $1.81 in four months (January’s average was $4.09), the steepest four-month climb anywhere in the series — steeper than the ramps into 2008, into 2022, or out of the 1979 oil shock. And May isn’t the end of it — AAA’s daily tracking put King County above $6 in June.
The proximate causes are well documented: the war with Iran and the disruption of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz have pushed crude sharply higher, the permanent closure of Valero’s Benicia refinery has tightened West Coast refining capacity, and Washington’s carbon-allowance program adds an estimated half-dollar per gallon on top. A supply shock landing on the country’s most supply-constrained fuel market, in one of its most heavily taxed states.
The gray line is the caveat that keeps the record honest: in real terms, this is expensive but not unprecedented. Deflated to today’s dollars, gas cost more during the 2008 spike (a peak of $6.57 in June), the 2011–2012 plateau (about $6.06), and the 2022 shock ($6.33 in June). May’s $5.90 sits about 10% under the real 2008 high — a record in the units your credit card sees, not yet in purchasing power. The long view sharpens the point: the 1979–80 oil shock, the last time a Middle East crisis did this to the pump, topped out in 1981 at the equivalent of only about $5.31 in today’s money — below where we are now. What felt ruinous to a driver in 1981 would be a relief today.
Gasoline is also the most visible piece of the broader inflation picture: it’s a small share of spending with an outsized grip on how expensive life feels. Adjusted for inflation, a gallon in 1978 ran about $3.49 — roughly $2.40 less than today’s tank, and a reminder of how much of the “record” is the dollar shrinking rather than gas alone climbing.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Price Data, gasoline, unleaded regular, per gallon, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, via FRED series APUS49D74714, monthly since January 1978. Monthly average of posted prices — it smooths over the daily swings AAA reports. Real line deflated by U.S. CPI-U (CPIAUCNS) to the latest month. New months post with the CPI release, mid-month; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
Most labor-market data arrives late. The monthly jobs report lands weeks after the fact; the unemployment rate is a lagging indicator by construction. Initial claims for unemployment insurance are the exception — filed the week someone loses a job, reported every Thursday, no smoothing. When layoffs turn, this is the first series to move.
The chart shows Washington’s weekly initial claims since 2021, past the off-scale spring-2020 spike (the week COVID closures hit, the state logged well over a hundred thousand claims in a single week — a value that flattens everything else if you leave it on the axis). What’s left is the signal that matters: the steady descent from the elevated 2021 readings back toward the low, calm range that defined the late-2010s labor market, and wherever the latest week now sits against it.
Read the level, but respect the noise. These are not seasonally adjusted, so the week-to-week sawtooth is mostly calendar — holidays, school-year edges, seasonal industries — not economic news. The honest way to watch this series is the trend across many weeks, and the direction relative to the same week a year earlier. A single spike is weather; a rising floor over a month or two is the thing to worry about.
Source: U.S. Employment & Training Administration, State UI Weekly Claims Report, via FRED series WAICLAIMS. Not seasonally adjusted; dated to the week ending Saturday. New claims post every Thursday around 5:30 a.m. Pacific; this chart refreshes automatically on the next daily build. State downturns shaded from FRED WAPHCI.
The Fremont Bridge counter is the closest thing Seattle has to a heartbeat monitor for cycling: an inductive loop in the deck that has tallied every bike crossing, hour by hour, since it went live in October 2012. Aggregate those hours into calendar years and you get one of the cleanest behavioral time series in the city — no survey, no sampling, just a count.
The shape tells the story of the past decade. Crossings held just under a million a year through the mid-2010s, then climbed to a peak of about 1.19 million in 2019. The pandemic erased that gain and then some: as downtown offices emptied, the bridge’s commute traffic fell to roughly 715,000 by 2021, a drop of nearly 40% from the peak. What’s notable is what came next — a steady, four-year climb back, with 2025 crossing back above a million for the first time since 2019.
Read it as a commuting signal as much as a cycling one. The Fremont Bridge carries a heavily commute-oriented flow between north Seattle and the job centers around South Lake Union and downtown, so its collapse and slow recovery track the return-to-office story as closely as any transit series — and more cleanly than most, because a bike counter can’t be revised, reweighted, or reclassified. The number is just the number.
Source: Seattle Department of Transportation, Fremont Bridge Bicycle Counter, via data.seattle.gov (dataset 65db-xm6k). Hourly counts aggregated to complete calendar years; the counter has run since October 2012. Data refreshes on the next daily build. State downturns shaded from FRED WAPHCI.
Building permits are the housing market’s leading indicator — nothing gets built that isn’t permitted first, so this series moves a year or more ahead of completions, move-ins, and rents. Over the 12 months through May, builders were authorized to start 19,263 homes in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro — up 26% from 15,279 in the same window a year earlier, and up from a trough of 15,257 last July.
That’s a real turn, and the monthly detail says it’s gathering pace: April and May 2026 each cleared 2,200 units, the strongest back-to-back pair since 2022. But keep the level in perspective. The trailing-12-month pace peaked at 31,860 in June 2022, so today’s rate is still 40% below the boom — and below every cyclical peak on the chart, including the one the series opens with in 1990. The 2023–25 slide wasn’t a 2009-style collapse (the floor then was 7,138), but it was the region quietly agreeing to build a third fewer homes while population kept growing.
Two reading notes. The monthly series is not seasonally adjusted and lumpy — a single large apartment project permits hundreds of units in one month — which is why this chart shows a rolling 12-month total rather than monthly bars; that’s also the honest way to read a metro-level permit series. And a permit is permission, not a foundation: in soft markets some permitted units are never started, so this line marks the ceiling on what shows up as new supply in the for-sale market a year or two out.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Building Permits Survey, New Private Housing Units Authorized, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED series SEAT653BPPRIV. Total units in permitted structures, single-family plus multifamily. New months post about three weeks after month-end; this chart refreshes on the next daily build.
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.
King County’s annual Point-in-Time Count found 18,365 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in late January 2026 — the highest tally on record, and up 9% from 2024. The increase is real but decelerating: the count rose 26% between 2022 and 2024, and less than half that pace over the two years since.
The harder number is where those people are. Unsheltered homelessness climbed to 11,829, or 64% of the total — up from 58% in 2024 and 57% in 2022. Nearly two in three people counted were outside any shelter: in a tent, a vehicle, or on the street. That share is rising not only because homelessness is growing but because shelter is shrinking: sheltered numbers actually fell, from 7,058 in 2024 to 6,536 in 2026, and the region lost 689 shelter beds between 2025 and 2026 (from 5,958 to 5,269), driven mostly by cuts to family shelter capacity. The gap between the two lines on the chart — the sheltered population — is closing from the wrong direction.
One caveat worth stating plainly, because it’s the most common way this number gets misread. The chart starts in 2022 on purpose. Since 2022, KCRHA and the University of Washington have estimated the unsheltered count using Respondent-Driven Sampling, a HUD-approved method that reaches people not connected to services. Earlier counts — the last was 11,751 in 2020 under the previous All Home street-count method — are not directly comparable, and stitching them onto this series would overstate the trend. Read the 2022→2026 climb; treat anything before it as a different ruler.
Source: King County Regional Homelessness Authority, 2026 Point-in-Time Count and Housing Inventory Count (initial release, June 2026). Count conducted January 29, 2026. Unsheltered estimates use Respondent-Driven Sampling (2022 onward), led by UW; not comparable to pre-2022 street counts. A comprehensive report follows later in 2026. Next count: early 2027.
The U.S. median age rose about two years over this stretch. King County’s rose 0.6 — from 36.8 in the 2009 estimate to 37.4 in 2024 (up 0.1 on the year). The county that contains Seattle and Bellevue keeps replacing the people who age out with younger ones who move in, the same in-migration story behind its population growth.
The suburban ring is a different picture. Snohomish aged 2.2 years to 38.6, and Pierce 1.8 years to 37.0 — still the youngest of the three, but closing the gap fast. All three remain below the U.S. median of about 39.
Recessions leave no mark. Median age is a slow-moving stock, and the 5-year smoothing blunts it further; the shaded 2009 and 2020 downturns pass without a bend in any line.
This is the age side of a broader urban-versus-suburban split. The immigrant share of the population is pulling apart the same way — the county changing fast, the city holding flat.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates — median age, table B01002 (B01002_001E), retrieved via FRED’s County Median Age release (King, Pierce, Snohomish). 5-year period estimates dated to the end year; consecutive vintages overlap, so read the trend, not the year-to-year wiggle. State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Economic Activity Index for Washington. Annual; the 2020–2024 vintage was released 29 Jan 2026, so the next (2021–2025) is due around the end of 2026.
A quarter-century ago, the city of Seattle was the more immigrant-heavy place: 16.9% foreign born in the 2000 Census, against 15.4% for King County as a whole. That ordering has reversed and then some. By 2024, King County reached 27.1% foreign born — up from 25.8% the year before and from 18.8% when the annual ACS began in 2005. The county’s foreign-born share is now nearly double the national figure (14.8%).
The city of Seattle did not come along for the ride. Its foreign-born share has wandered in a flat band — roughly 18% to 20% for two decades — and sits at 19.9% in 2024, barely above its 2005 reading. (The single-year city estimates are noisy; the 2008 dip to 15.9% is sampling wobble, not an exodus.) The widening gap between the two lines is the whole story: the people moving in are settling on the Eastside — Bellevue, Redmond, Sammamish — and across south King County — Kent, SeaTac, Federal Way, Tukwila — not inside the city limits.
This is the demographic counterpart to the median-age split: the suburban ring, not the core, is where the county is changing fastest.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 1-year estimates — Place of Birth by Nativity, table B05002 (foreign born B05002_013E ÷ total B05002_001E), for Seattle city, King County, and the United States. The 2000 figures are from Census 2000 SF3 (table P021). There is no standard ACS 1-year release for 2020. One-year estimates for a single city or county carry meaningful sampling error — read the trend, not the year-to-year wiggle. State downturns: Philadelphia Fed Coincident Economic Activity Index for Washington. The 2024 ACS 1-year was released in September 2025; the 2025 vintage is due around September 2026.
On Washington’s new April 1 estimates, the City of Seattle reached 823,400 in 2026 — up 6,800, or 0.8%, from 2025. King County reached 2,424,700, up 13,000, or 0.5%. Both grew, but the striking part is the deceleration: last year the city added 18,900 (2.4%) and the county 33,600 (1.4%), so 2026’s gains are roughly a third of the prior year’s pace.
For Seattle, 0.8% is the smallest annual gain since 2021, the pandemic-dented low. For King County, 0.5% is the weakest in over a decade — slower even than 2021. The county’s growth has stair-stepped down for three straight years while the city held near 2.4%; this is the first year the city has clearly joined it.
The long view is unchanged. Since 1990 the city has grown 60% and the county 61% — still nearly in lockstep, which is why Seattle’s share of King County has barely moved, from 34.3% to 34.0%. One soft year doesn’t bend a 36-year line. Whether it’s the start of a plateau or a one-year pause is the thing to watch in the 2027 estimate.
Source: WA Office of Financial Management, April 1 official population estimates (state, county and city, 1990 to present). Shaded bands: Washington economic downturns (peak-to-trough in the Philadelphia Fed Coincident Index for WA, FRED: WAPHCI). Annual; OFM releases the next April 1 estimate in late June 2027.