Construction’s share of Seattle jobs, July 2026
Construction and mining was 5.7% of Seattle-metro payroll jobs in July 2026 — 122,500 jobs. The share peaked at 7.5% in August 2007 and bottomed at 4.5% in January 2012.
This is the closest thing the site has to a building-cycle indicator that is not about permits. It measures how much of the region’s labour is pointed at construction, and unlike the job count it cannot be flattered by an economy that is simply larger than it used to be — the share fell by nearly a third after 2007 while the metro kept adding jobs everywhere else.
Numerator and denominator are the same BLS release for the same metro, so the share stays consistent through revisions, and it is computed at read time rather than stored. Not seasonally adjusted: construction has a real summer, so compare to the same month a year earlier.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, mining, logging and construction against total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.