Washington’s restaurants, bars and other food services made $5.31 billion in taxable sales in Q3 2025. Hotels and other lodging made $1.54 billion.
These are statewide figures, not Seattle’s. The Department of Revenue publishes taxable sales by city and by industry, but not by both; Seattle’s own total, all industries together, has a post of its own. King County is the largest single part of the state’s restaurant and hotel trade, so the state line is the closest published measure of what the region’s restaurants and hotels take in.
The in-today’s-dollars charts matter here more than usual: menu prices and room rates rose fast after 2021, so a dollar total can climb while fewer meals are served. In July 2025 dollars, restaurant sales peaked at $5.32 billion in Q3 2023, hotel sales at $1.61 billion in Q3 2018. Hotels peak in the third quarter every year, so compare a quarter with the same quarter a year earlier. The break in the lines in 2024 is the source’s: DOR’s tables for the third and fourth quarters of 2024 repeat the second quarter’s restaurant and hotel figures to the dollar, so those two quarters are left out rather than drawn. DOR publishes a quarter four to six months after it ends.
Source: Washington State Department of Revenue, Quarterly Business Review, Table 6, retail sales tax by industry, statewide; deflated by the U.S. CPI-U. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle-metro trade, transportation and utilities employers had 351,600 people on payroll in September 2026, up 0.7% from a year earlier. That is 16.4% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 16.4% a year before.
The broadest supersector in the survey: wholesale and retail trade, warehousing, trucking, air and water transport, couriers and utilities. It holds the port, the airport and a large part of the non-office e-commerce workforce — BLS files each workplace by what it does, so a fulfilment centre is warehousing even when the company is thought of as tech. Its share has drifted down for most of the series as other sectors grew faster, which is the shape of a metro whose growth moved into offices.
The two charts answer different questions. The count peaked at 367,200 in December 2021 and says whether the sector is hiring. The share — from 20.8% in January 1990, with a high of 21.2% in December 1990 and a low of 16.3% in May 2026 — says whether it is growing faster or slower than the rest of the economy.
Not seasonally adjusted, so compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from two series in the same BLS release, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, trade, transportation and utilities and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653TRADN, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle-metro financial activities employers had 97,500 people on payroll in September 2026, down 2.9% from a year earlier. That is 4.6% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 4.7% a year before.
Finance and insurance plus real estate, rental and leasing — banks, insurers, mortgage lenders, brokers and property managers. Seattle’s version of this sector was shaped by the mortgage boom of the 2000s and by Washington Mutual, headquartered here until its failure in 2008, and it has never regained that weight. Real estate and lending also make it sensitive to interest rates in a way most sectors are not.
The two charts answer different questions. The count peaked at 108,900 in December 2005 and says whether the sector is hiring. The share — from 6.3% in January 1990, with a high of 6.8% in August 2003 and a low of 4.6% in September 2026 — says whether it is growing faster or slower than the rest of the economy.
Not seasonally adjusted, so compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from two series in the same BLS release, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, financial activities and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653FIREN, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle-metro professional and business services employers had 384,300 people on payroll in September 2026, up 0.7% from a year earlier. That is 17.9% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 18.0% a year before.
This is one of the metro’s largest supersectors, and the least understood. It covers professional, scientific and technical services — law, accounting, engineering, architecture, computer systems design — plus the head offices of companies, and administrative support, which includes temp agencies and building services. A good share of what Seattle calls tech work is counted here rather than under ‘information’. The temp-help piece makes it one of the first sectors to cut in a downturn: agency workers are the easiest jobs to end.
The two charts answer different questions. The count peaked at 398,700 in August 2022 and says whether the sector is hiring. The share — from 10.3% in January 1990, with a high of 18.9% in April 2022 and a low of 10.3% in January 1990 — says whether it is growing faster or slower than the rest of the economy.
Not seasonally adjusted, so compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from two series in the same BLS release, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, professional and business services and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653PBSVN, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle-metro education and health employers had 319,600 people on payroll in September 2026, up 3.1% from a year earlier. That is 14.9% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 14.6% a year before.
This is the private sector only: hospitals, clinics, nursing and residential care, social assistance, private schools and colleges. Public schools and the University of Washington are counted as government. It is the steadiest sector in the data, because demand follows the size and the age of the population rather than the business cycle — the one sharp break in its line is spring 2020, when elective care stopped.
The two charts answer different questions. The count peaked at 319,600 in September 2026 and says whether the sector is hiring. The share — from 9.5% in January 1990, with a high of 14.9% in February 2026 and a low of 9.4% in July 1990 — says whether it is growing faster or slower than the rest of the economy.
Not seasonally adjusted, so compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from two series in the same BLS release, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, education and health and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653EDUHN, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.
The Seattle metro permitted 19,477 housing units in the twelve months through September 2026, up 24.4% from the twelve months before. The twelve-month total peaked at 34,915 in June 1990 and bottomed at 7,138 in November 2009.
The first chart is the trend. A twelve-month sum holds a whole year of filings, so one large building cannot move it much and the seasons cancel out. It is the line to read for whether Seattle is permitting more housing or less.
The second chart is the same data one month at a time, and it shows why the first one exists. In September 2026 alone the metro permitted 750 units — the light grey line — which is worth about 4% of the year. One apartment building can be several hundred units filed on one day, so the raw count swings between 386 and 4,207 without the industry doing anything unusual; every ‘permits plunge’ story is built on that line alone. The orange line is a three-month average — 1,147 a month, down 13.6% on a year earlier — which turns within a season and still takes out most of the single-filing noise.
Permits lead construction: they say what builders intend, and the monthly construction jobs post says what they did. This is the monthly update to the permit slump. Not seasonally adjusted — permits have a spring — so compare with the same months a year earlier.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, monthly, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653BPPRIV). The twelve-month sum and three-month average are computed from the monthly count. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle Fire was dispatched to 116 overdose calls in September 2026, up 5.5% from a year earlier. Across the series the monthly count has run between 68 (August 2022) and 233 (October 2023).
This is a floor, not a count. The dispatch feed carries no overdose flag; the number comes from matching the free-text dispatch type, so a call logged as an aid response or an unconscious person is not in it even when that is what it was. The real figure is higher, by an unknown and probably unstable margin.
The series starts in August 2022 because that is when the dispatch label first appears in the feed. The nineteen years in front of it are the absence of a category, not the absence of overdoses, and they are clipped out of both the chart and the arithmetic above so nothing here reports a record low that is really a missing label. It counts dispatches, not patients or deaths.
Source: Seattle Fire Department, Real-Time 911 dispatch feed, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata kzjm-xkqj), matched on dispatch type. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle Fire dispatched 9,601 responses in September 2026, up 4.0% from a year earlier. Despite the name, this is mostly not a fire series, which is why the categories now get their own graphs rather than sharing a pair of axes: medical work is most of the volume and the fire work is small enough that on a shared scale it is a flat line along the bottom.
Aid responses — the basic (BLS) tier, and the single largest category, so it leads — ran 5,334, up 2.7% year over year. Medic responses — paramedic-level (ALS) calls, the most serious tier — ran 1,423, up 14.1%. Between them that is 6,757 of the month’s total, leaving about 2,844 responses across everything else the department is sent to.
Fires are separable, with a caveat. The feed has no fire flag — only a free-text dispatch type — so the third chart counts responses whose type names a fire (‘Fire in Building’, ‘Brush Fire’, ‘Auto Fire’), with automatic alarms excluded because most of those turn out not to be fires. That makes it a floor on fire work rather than a count of fires: a fire first dispatched as an alarm, or under a label like ‘Illegal Burn’, is not in it.
The sawtooth is real seasonality, plus the calendar. Part of the month-to-month zigzag is just month length — February has 28 days and posts a low count for that reason alone. Per day, over the last decade, July runs about +6% against the surrounding year and April about -4%: the load builds through the summer and falls off in the spring. That is the shape of more people outdoors, more heat, more traffic and more alcohol — it shows up strongest in aid calls and only weakly in medic calls, which is what you would expect if the summer increment is minor injury rather than cardiac arrest. Because the series is not seasonally adjusted, compare a month to the same month a year earlier, never to the one before it.
All of these count dispatched responses, not incidents or patients — one event can draw several units, so the lines move with deployment practice as well as with need.
Source: Seattle Fire Department, Real-Time 911 Calls, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata kzjm-xkqj). Categories are cut from the free-text dispatch type, so they are floors rather than exact counts. Auto-generated each build.
The surface of central Puget Sound off Jefferson Head was 9.7°C in April 2026. The April average since 2000 is 9.5°C, with the warmest April at 11.6°C in 2005 and the coolest at 7.9°C in 2023. King County publishes its marine samples after review, about six months behind, so this is the newest month there is.
Oxygen in the deep water. At 180 metres and below, the water held 7.3 milligrams of oxygen per litre in April 2026, and 6.5 on average over the last twelve months. The low point usually comes in early autumn, when dense, oxygen-poor ocean water that has crept in along the bottom over the summer has reached furthest; the lowest month in this record was 5.2, in November 2014. That is not hypoxia, the level below about 2 milligrams at which fish leave or die: the main basin is well flushed. Hood Canal and the south Sound are where Puget Sound runs short of oxygen.
Sea level. At the Seattle tide gauge on Colman Dock, the water stood 136 millimetres above the 1983-2001 average in September 2026. The 12-month mean is +118 mm. The record runs back to 1899, and its first 12-month mean, to November 1899, was -210 mm: the last year stood about 33 centimetres higher than the first. This is relative sea level — the water against the land the gauge stands on — and a single month is full of weather: low pressure and south winds stand water up in Elliott Bay every winter, and El Niño years run high. The 12-month line is the one to read.
Source: King County Water and Land Resources Division, marine water quality data, station KSBP01; NOAA tide gauge 9447130, monthly means. Auto-generated each build.
The Seattle metro’s information sector employed 132,100 people in September 2026, down 0.8% from a year earlier. That is 6.2% of every payroll job in the metro, against 6.3% a year before.
The two charts answer different questions. The head count says whether the sector is hiring. The share says whether it is hiring faster than everyone else — a sector can add jobs every month and still shrink as a part of the economy. The count peaked at 151,200 in June 2022; the share peaked at 7.2% in June 2022, up from 2.7% when the series opens 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 both lines have an annual wobble on top of the trend; compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from two series in the same BLS release, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, information sector and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653INFON, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.