Restaurant and hotel jobs, September 2026
Seattle-metro restaurants, bars, hotels and venues employed 208,400 people in September 2026, up 1.1% from a year earlier — 9.7% of all payroll jobs in the metro.
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 — and its share of the region’s jobs fell to 6.1%. Everything to the right of that notch is the recovery.
The share chart is the longer story. As the part of the region’s work done in factories fell, the part done serving people rose — from 8.1% when the series opens in January 1990 to a peak of 10.3% in August 2018. That is a real change in what a Seattle job is, and not a neutral one: these are the jobs least likely to cover what the rent takes.
Not seasonally adjusted, and summer is genuinely the busy season here, so compare with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from the same BLS release as the count.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, leisure and hospitality and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. 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.