Seattle tech employment, August 2026
The Seattle metro’s information sector employed 132,100 people in August 2026, down 0.4% from a year earlier. The sector peaked at 151,200 in June 2022; it started this chart at 34,500 in January 1990.
‘Information’ is not ‘tech’, and the gap is large. It is the BLS sector covering software publishers, telecoms, broadcasting and publishing. A great deal of Seattle technology work is booked elsewhere — Amazon is classified under retail, cloud infrastructure lands under several other headings, and contract engineering sits in professional services — so read this line as a floor on tech employment rather than a measure of it. What it is good for is the trend: the classification has been applied consistently since 1990, so the shape is right even where the level is low.
Not seasonally adjusted, which is why the line has an annual wobble on top of the trend. For how this sector’s claim on the region’s payroll compares with manufacturing’s, see the shares post; this one is the head count on its own.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, information sector, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653INFON). Auto-generated each build.