Seattle-metro manufacturing jobs, August 2026
Seattle-metro manufacturers employed 168,600 people in August 2026, up 3.7% from a year earlier. The sector peaked at 246,500 jobs in June 1998 and has shed roughly 32% of that since.
In this region manufacturing is very close to a Boeing series with a rounding error attached, which is why the deep single-month notches line up with machinist strikes rather than with recessions — the data is not seasonally adjusted, so a walkout shows up whole. Reading them as anything else is the standard mistake with this chart.
The sector’s shrinking share of total payrolls is the same story told against the size of the economy, and it is the more damning version.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, manufacturing, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. Auto-generated each build.