Link light rail ridership, July 2026
Link carried 5,205,705 boardings in July 2026, up 41.8% from a year earlier. The record month is 5,205,705 (July 2026); today’s figure is 0% above it.
Link is the one Seattle transit number that is not really about the economy: the line keeps getting longer. Extensions to Northgate, the Eastside and Lynnwood each added stations and riders, so a rise here is partly more people riding and partly more railway to ride — which is why the year-over-year comparison matters more than the level, and why a step up in the line usually has an opening date behind it rather than a change in behaviour.
These are boardings, not journeys or people. A trip with a transfer counts twice, so a network that adds a transfer point reports more ridership from the same riders. The figures are Sound Transit’s own submissions to the federal National Transit Database, which is what makes them comparable with the bus and ferry numbers here; the agency’s public tracker uses a slightly different basis and will not always match. Not seasonally adjusted.
The chart starts at the July 2009 opening of Central Link. Sound Transit reported light-rail boardings to the NTD for six years before that, but they are Tacoma’s line — a separate 1.6-mile route at the other end of the corridor, running in the tens of thousands a month — and drawn beside Seattle’s millions they would read as a railway that did not exist yet.
Source: Federal Transit Administration, National Transit Database monthly module, Sound Transit light rail unlinked passenger trips, from the July 2009 opening of Central Link. Auto-generated each build.