Checkouts per Seattleite, August 2026
Seattle Public Library lent 888,922 items in August 2026 — 1.08 per city resident, up 7.4% on the year as a rate.
Per head is the version of this series that can be compared across twenty years, because Seattle in August 2026 is a substantially larger city than the one the series starts in. The peak was 1.38 checkouts per resident in March 2009; the floor was 0.44 in April 2005. The checkout count tracks the library’s total workload, which is the right measure for the library; this one tracks how much the average Seattleite uses it, which is the right measure for the city.
Two dents in the line are events rather than trends: the 2020 branch closures, and a ransomware attack over Memorial Day weekend 2024 that took down the catalogue, the public computers and the e-book platforms, with service restored only in stages over the months that followed. Checkouts that could not be made — or could not be recorded — are simply missing from the count. It counts checkout events rather than borrowers, so one person taking out six books is six. The denominator is OFM’s April 1 city estimate, interpolated between years.
Sources: Seattle Public Library, Checkouts by Title, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tmmm-ytt6); Washington State Office of Financial Management April 1 population estimates for the city of Seattle, interpolated to monthly. Auto-generated each build.