Manufacturing’s share of Seattle jobs, August 2026
Manufacturing was 7.9% of Seattle-metro payroll jobs in August 2026: 168,600 manufacturing jobs against every payroll in the metro. The share peaked at 18.4% in January 1990.
The share falls faster than the job count does, and the difference between the two charts is the point of this one. Manufacturing employment has declined; the rest of the metro’s economy has grown. Both together are why a sector that once shaped the region’s politics now moves its headline employment number hardly at all.
Numerator and denominator come from the same BLS release for the same metro, so the share stays internally consistent even in a month the levels are revised — this is a ratio computed at read time from two stored series, never a stored series of its own.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, manufacturing and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time from the two stored series. Auto-generated each build.