Restaurant and hotel jobs, August 2026
Seattle-metro restaurants, bars, hotels and venues employed 214,800 people in August 2026, up 1.9% from a year earlier.
No other series on this site records 2020 as plainly. Employment in this sector fell from 202,400 in February 2020 to 114,400 in April 2020 — a drop of 43%, inside two months, in an industry that cannot be done from home. Everything to the right of that notch is the recovery, and how close it has come to the old trend line is the question the chart is for.
It is also the sector where a job is least likely to pay the rent, which is why it is worth watching next to what the rent takes. Not seasonally adjusted, and summer is genuinely the busy season here.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, leisure and hospitality, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. Auto-generated each build.
Corrected 2026-10-24: this post first said employment fell to 102,600 in January 1990 — the lowest month in the whole series, not the 2020 low. The figures above are now the 2020 low.