The Washington Department of Licensing keeps a running count of every electric vehicle registered in the state, and it makes for one of the cleanest adoption curves you’ll find: a physical count of cars on the road, not a survey or a projection. At the end of May 2026 there were about 280,000 registered EVs in Washington — battery-electric and plug-in hybrid combined — up from just 22,000 at the start of 2017. That’s nearly a 13-fold increase in nine years. King County holds about 136,000 of them, just under half the statewide fleet, which tracks its share of the state’s wealth, its charging density, and its politics.
The news in this update is the shape of the last year. For most of the decade the line bent upward — each year’s gain bigger than the last. That has stopped. Growth has decelerated sharply, and in May 2026 the statewide fleet actually dipped for the first time in the series’ history outside the 2020 shutdown, slipping about 1,200 vehicles from its April peak. Year-over-year the numbers are still positive — +13.5% statewide, +10.2% in King County — but the monthly pace that produced those gains has largely evaporated. One month doesn’t make a trend, and a registration count can be revised, so the honest read is “flattening, watch it,” not “falling.” But the flattening is real and it is recent.
Underneath the total, the plug-in hybrid is fading. Battery-electric vehicles are now about 80% of the fleet (roughly 225,000) and still creeping up; plug-in hybrids (about 54,000) peaked in early 2026 and have been shrinking since. So the plateau in the headline number is really two stories at once — battery-electric growth cooling, and plug-in hybrids in outright decline — converging into a curve that, for the first time since these cars showed up in Washington, has stopped bending toward the sky.
Source: Washington State Department of Licensing, Electric Vehicle Population, via data.wa.gov (dataset 3d5d-sdqb). Count of EVs registered in Washington at each month-end (filtered to registration state = WA; King County is the county cut). Battery-electric + plug-in hybrid. Data refreshes monthly on the next daily build. State downturn shaded from FRED WAPHCI.
What’s coming on seattletrendlines.com the week of August 10–14 — 8 posts on the calendar.
Monday, August 10 — Washington’s EV fleet: a decade of fast growth, now flattening.
Tuesday, August 11 — How long a King County listing sits, July 2026; The shrinking factory floor, June 2026.
Wednesday, August 12 — The construction cycle, June 2026; Washington business applications, June 2026.
Thursday, August 13 — Restaurants, hotels and the long climb back, June 2026; The permit numbers nobody should read, June 2026.
Friday, August 14 — What a Seattle dollar is worth, April 2026.
This is the plan, not a promise. Every weekday post here is tied to a data release, and a release that slips takes its post with it — the post simply waits for the day its numbers land. A figure that arrives early, a revision worth writing about, or an unexpected story out of Seattle can just as easily add a post that isn’t on this list. Expect the week to look roughly like this, and expect at least one day of it not to.
The week of August 3–7 on seattletrendlines.com, in five posts.
Monday, August 3 — Lake Washington sockeye: the run that no longer runs. Sockeye salmon have been counted at the Ballard Locks every year since 1972. Runs that once topped half a million fish have collapsed: just 17,881 crossed in 2025, and the run hasn’t cleared the 350,000 needed to open a fishery since 2006.
Tuesday, August 4 — Seattle-metro unemployment, June 2026. Seattle-metro unemployment was 5.0% in June 2026, the newest month in the series and the monthly update to the unemployment post. That is up 0.3 points from 4.7% in the same month a year earlier, and up from 4.8% the month before.
Wednesday, August 5 — What a Seattle-area house is worth, June 2026. The typical Seattle-metro home was worth $729,403 in June 2026, down 1.8% from a year earlier. The index peaked at $769,953 in June 2022, so the market is still 5.3% below its high-water mark.
Thursday, August 6 — Seattle library checkouts, July 2026. Seattle Public Library patrons checked out 869,036 items in July 2026, up 5.7% from a year earlier.
Friday, August 7 — Seattle Fire 911 responses, July 2026. Seattle Fire dispatched 9,886 responses in July 2026, down 3.8% from a year earlier.
The week in review: every post from August 3–7, summarised from its own listing blurb and linked. Assembled each Saturday from the posts that actually published that week.
Seattle Fire dispatched 9,886 responses in July 2026, down 3.8% from a year earlier. Despite the name, this is mostly not a fire series: aid and medic calls are the large majority of the volume, which makes it a rough read on population and on medical distress rather than on fires.
It counts dispatched responses, not incidents or patients — one event can draw several units, so the line moves with deployment practice as well as with need.
Source: Seattle Fire Department, Real-Time 911 Calls, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata kzjm-xkqj). Auto-generated each build.
Seattle Public Library patrons checked out 869,036 items in July 2026, up 5.7% from a year earlier. The series counts checkout events rather than borrowers, and it runs back to 2005 — long enough to show the 2020 branch closures as the cliff they were. What came back afterward is not what left: the recovery is substantially digital, so the physical/digital mix on either side of 2020 is not the same library.
Corrected 2026-09-29: this post first reported 248,692 checkouts for July 2026, up 3.8% on the year. That figure counted the titles checked out, not the checkouts; each title can go out many times in a month. The chart and figures above are now total checkouts.
Source: Seattle Public Library, Checkouts by Title, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tmmm-ytt6). Auto-generated each build.
The typical Seattle-metro home was worth $729,403 in June 2026, down 1.8% from a year earlier. The index peaked at $769,953 in June 2022, so the market is still 5.3% below its high-water mark. ZHVI tracks the value of the typical home rather than the price of the homes that happened to sell, so it does not swing with the mix of what is on the market — which is what makes it readable month to month.
Source: Zillow Research, Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), all homes, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, nominal dollars. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.
Seattle-metro unemployment was 5.0% in June 2026, the newest month in the series and the monthly update to the unemployment post. That is up 0.3 points from 4.7% in the same month a year earlier, and up from 4.8% the month before. The chart carries the full history back to 1994; the older post’s version of it stops at the month it was published with, so the two lines end in different places on purpose.
The year-ago comparison is the one to trust here. These numbers are not seasonally adjusted, so part of every month-to-month move is just the calendar — hiring for the holidays, students leaving and re-entering the labor force — and only the same month a year earlier strips that out. Keep the scale in mind too: this series ran from 2.4% in February 2020 to 17.6% in April 2020, so a few tenths of a point is a wobble, not a turn. And because the rate is a ratio, it can fall for the wrong reason — people who stop looking for work leave the denominator, and the rate improves with nobody hired.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA unemployment rate, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED SEAT653URN. Auto-generated each build.
Every summer since 1972, biologists have stood at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks — the Ballard Locks — and counted sockeye salmon one by one as they leave saltwater and climb the fish ladder toward Lake Washington. It is one of Seattle’s great free spectacles, and one of its longest-running civic data series. In 2025 the count came to 17,881 fish. In 1988 it was 531,063.
That is the whole story in two numbers, but the shape between them matters. For three decades the run was volatile but healthy, regularly swinging between 200,000 and half a million fish; the counts crossed 350,000 — the escapement threshold that has to be met before any surplus can be fished — in a dozen different years. Then, after a last big return of about 417,000 in 2006, the line steps down and stays down. The run has not reached the 350,000 goal since 2006, and the lake’s once-beloved summer sockeye fishery, which drew thousands of boats to Lake Washington in good years, has stayed closed ever since. The typical run since 2007 has been around 37,000 fish — roughly a fifth of the long-run norm.
Fisheries scientists point to a convergence of pressures rather than a single villain: lethally warm water in the Lake Washington Ship Canal that kills adult sockeye before they can spawn, disease that thrives in that warm water, poor survival in a changing ocean, and predation. A hatchery on the Cedar River was built to prop the run up, and hasn’t reversed it. The 2026 count is being tallied at the ladder as this posts — early numbers, still subject to WDFW review, point to another thin year. A run that was once big enough to fish is now watched mainly to see whether it holds on at all.
Source: Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, Lake Washington salmon counts, conducted with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe at the Ballard Locks. Sockeye are counted daily from June 12 through July; the annual totals shown here run 1972–2025. The 350,000 line is the escapement goal that must be met to open a fishery. Updated each summer.
What’s coming on seattletrendlines.com the week of August 3–7 — five posts on the calendar.
Monday, August 3 — Lake Washington sockeye: the run that no longer runs.
Tuesday, August 4 — Seattle-metro unemployment, June 2026.
Wednesday, August 5 — What a Seattle-area house is worth, June 2026.
Thursday, August 6 — Seattle library checkouts, July 2026.
Friday, August 7 — Seattle Fire 911 responses, July 2026.
This is the plan, not a promise. Every weekday post here is tied to a data release, and a release that slips takes its post with it — the post simply waits for the day its numbers land. A figure that arrives early, a revision worth writing about, or an unexpected story out of Seattle can just as easily add a post that isn’t on this list. Expect the week to look roughly like this, and expect at least one day of it not to.
The week of July 27–31 on seattletrendlines.com, in five posts.
Monday, July 27 — Seattle asking rents, June 2026. The typical asking rent in the Seattle metro was $2,261 a month in June 2026, up 1.3% from a year earlier.
Tuesday, July 28 — Case-Shiller Seattle, June 2026. The Case-Shiller Seattle home price index read 393.2 in June 2026 — down 1.9% from a year earlier, and 3.9× its January 2000 level.
Wednesday, July 29 — Boeing delivered 64 jets in June — 54 of them built in Puget Sound. Boeing handed over 64 commercial airplanes in June 2026, lifting first-half deliveries to 314 — its strongest first half since 2018. Fifty-four of June’s jets rolled out of Renton and Everett.
Thursday, July 30 — Seattle uses less water than it did in 1990 — with 44% more people. The SPU regional water system delivered about 170 million gallons a day in 1990 and roughly 124 by 2022 — down about 27%, even as the population it serves grew around 44%. It’s the clearest conservation success in the region’s infrastructure.
Friday, July 31 — Reported crime in Seattle, July 2026. Seattle police recorded 5,748 offenses in July 2026, down 3.7% from a year earlier, across all four NIBRS crime-against categories.
The week in review: every post from July 27–31, summarised from its own listing blurb and linked. Assembled each Saturday from the posts that actually published that week.