The construction cycle, June 2026
The Seattle metro’s construction trades employed 121,900 people in June 2026, down 1.1% from a year earlier. Construction is the most cyclical employer in the region — it shed more than 40% of these jobs between the 2007 peak and the 2012 bottom — so it reads as an early warning on the rest of the economy. Set it against the permit slump: permits are what gets started, and this is who is left to build it. (FRED publishes mining, logging and construction as one series for this metro; in Seattle it is construction almost end to end.)
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment (CES), Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, mining/logging/construction, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED SMU53426601500000001. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.