What’s coming on seattletrendlines.com the week of October 5–9 — 10 posts, two a day, every weekday.

Monday, October 5 — King County for-sale inventory, September 2026; Sea-Tac against normal, September 2026.

Tuesday, October 6 — King County asking prices, September 2026; What King County sellers listed, September 2026.

Wednesday, October 7 — How long a King County listing sits, September 2026; King County homes under contract, September 2026.

Thursday, October 8 — Seattle’s labor force, August 2026; Seattle-metro unemployment, August 2026.

Friday, October 9 — Washington jobless claims, week of Sep 26, 2026 (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet); Link light rail ridership, August 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 September 28 – October 2 on seattletrendlines.com, in 11 posts.

Monday, September 28 — Seattle Fire 911 responses, August 2026. Seattle Fire dispatched 10,147 responses in August 2026, up 2.9% from a year earlier.

Monday, September 28 — Seattle Fire overdose responses, August 2026. Seattle Fire was dispatched to 98 overdose calls in August 2026, down 30.5% from a year earlier. Across the series the monthly count has run between 68 (August 2022) and 233 (October 2023).

Monday, September 28 — Building permits, month by month, August 2026. The Seattle metro permitted 990 housing units in August 2026. Against the trailing twelve months — 20,152 units — that single month is worth roughly 5% of a year.

Tuesday, September 29 — The three parks, August 2026. The three national parks within a few hours of Seattle drew 881,708 recreation visits in August 2026: 397,493 at Mount Rainier, 528,764 at Olympic and 4,991 at North Cascades. Three charts, not three lines.

Tuesday, September 29 — Seattle tech employment, August 2026. The Seattle metro’s information sector employed 132,100 people in August 2026, down 0.4% from a year earlier. The sector peaked at 151,200 in June 2022; it started this chart at 34,500 in January 1990.

Wednesday, September 30 — 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.

Wednesday, September 30 — Seattle home prices, June 2026. The monthly home-price refresh, from the two measures that disagree usefully. Case-Shiller put the Seattle index at 393.2 in June 2026, down 1.9% on the year.

Thursday, October 1 — 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.

Thursday, October 1 — Seattle-metro other services jobs, August 2026. Seattle-metro other services employers had 75,400 people on payroll in August 2026, up 0.8% from a year earlier. That is 3.5% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 3.5% a year before.

Friday, October 2 — Seattle home prices, July 2026. The monthly home-price refresh, from the two measures that disagree usefully. Case-Shiller put the Seattle index at 391.3 in July 2026, down 1.6% on the year.

Friday, October 2 — What Seattle reports to the city, September 2026. Seattle residents filed 31,453 service requests in September 2026 — potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping, abandoned vehicles, encampments — up 0.8% from a year earlier.

The monthly home-price refresh, from the two measures that disagree usefully. Case-Shiller put the Seattle index at 391.3 in July 2026, down 1.6% on the year. Zillow’s index valued the typical metro home at $727,359 in August 2026, down 1.5% on the year. They measure different things — Case-Shiller tracks repeat sales of the same homes and reports a three-month average two months late; Zillow values the entire housing stock monthly — so treat Case-Shiller as the shape and Zillow as the level.

The second chart shows the tier split, and it is the reason this post carries Case-Shiller at all: S&P divides the metro’s repeat sales into thirds by price, and the cheapest third has outrun the most expensive third for over a decade. That is what a supply shortage at the bottom of a market looks like, and no single headline index can show it.

Seattle residents filed 31,453 service requests in September 2026 — potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping, abandoned vehicles, encampments — up 0.8% from a year earlier. The series opens at 4,014 a month in January 2013; its high was 33,503 in August 2025.

This measures reporting, not conditions, and the two come apart. A month with more graffiti reports is a month more people told the city about graffiti, which moves with how easy reporting is at least as much as with how much graffiti there is. Over the span of this chart intake moved from phone calls to the Find It, Fix It apps, and a channel that takes thirty seconds collects complaints a channel that takes ten minutes never heard. Read a rise here as demand for city services being expressed, not as the city getting worse.

The independent check is a feed nobody chooses to file into — the fire department’s 911 dispatches, which are also on this site. Where the two move together, something real is happening; where only this one moves, the channel changed. Requests are dated by when they were created, and one incident reported by three neighbours is three rows.

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.

Seattle-metro other services employers had 75,400 people on payroll in August 2026, up 0.8% from a year earlier. That is 3.5% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 3.5% a year before.

The small, neighbourhood-scale part of the economy: repair and maintenance shops, hair and nail salons, dry cleaners, funeral homes, religious congregations, unions and civic and professional associations. It is the sector most made of face-to-face work in small businesses, which is why the spring of 2020 hit it so hard — and why its count is worth watching for whether it ever gets back to where it was before.

The two charts answer different questions. The count peaked at 80,300 in February 2020 and says whether the sector is hiring. The share — from 3.7% in January 1990, with a high of 3.9% in August 2011 and a low of 3.3% in March 2021 — 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.

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.

The monthly home-price refresh, from the two measures that disagree usefully. Case-Shiller put the Seattle index at 393.2 in June 2026, down 1.9% on the year. Zillow’s index valued the typical metro home at $727,359 in August 2026, down 1.5% on the year. They measure different things — Case-Shiller tracks repeat sales of the same homes and reports a three-month average two months late; Zillow values the entire housing stock monthly — so treat Case-Shiller as the shape and Zillow as the level.

The second chart shows the tier split, and it is the reason this post carries Case-Shiller at all: S&P divides the metro’s repeat sales into thirds by price, and the cheapest third has outrun the most expensive third for over a decade. That is what a supply shortage at the bottom of a market looks like, and no single headline index can show it.

The three national parks within a few hours of Seattle drew 881,708 recreation visits in August 2026: 397,493 at Mount Rainier, 528,764 at Olympic and 4,991 at North Cascades.

Three charts, not three lines. Olympic runs to nearly a million visits in a peak month and North Cascades to about ten thousand — a factor of a hundred — so on shared axes the two smaller parks would be flat against the bottom and only Olympic would be readable. Each park gets its own scale, in order of how many people they see.

The season is most of the signal. These are mountain parks with roads and passes that close, so the year is a spike: Rainier’s record month is 449,446 in July 2021, and its quietest months are two orders of magnitude below that — the record low of 98 in April 2020 is a closed park rather than a quiet one. Nothing here is seasonally adjusted, and the only comparison that means anything is with the same month a year earlier — this month against last month is just the calendar.

North Cascades counts differently after 1990, and its chart starts there. Before 1991 the series carried the whole North Cascades complex, including the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas — which is where nearly all the traffic is, because Highway 20 runs through Ross Lake. Counted that way it was a 600,000-visit park; counted as the park proper it is a 20,000-visit one. Neither number is wrong and the drop between them is not a collapse in visits, so drawing across it would invent a story. A recreation visit is a person entering the park for recreation, not a unique visitor: one person over a long weekend can be several.

The Seattle metro’s information sector employed 132,100 people in August 2026, down 0.4% from a year earlier. The sector peaked at 151,200 in June 2022; it started this chart at 34,500 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 the line has an annual wobble on top of the trend. For how this sector’s claim on the region’s payroll compares with manufacturing’s, see the shares post; this one is the head count on its own.

Seattle Fire dispatched 10,147 responses in August 2026, up 2.9% 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.

Medic responses — paramedic-level (ALS) calls, the most serious tier — ran 1,543, up 17.3% year over year. Aid responses — the basic (BLS) tier, and the single largest category — ran 5,405, down 3.2%. Between them that is 6,948 of the month’s total, leaving about 3,199 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.

Seattle Fire was dispatched to 98 overdose calls in August 2026, down 30.5% 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.

The Seattle metro permitted 990 housing units in August 2026. Against the trailing twelve months — 20,152 units — that single month is worth roughly 5% of a year.

This is the raw monthly series, and it is here to show how little a single month is worth. One large apartment building can be several hundred units filed on one day, so the line swings between 386 and 4207 without the construction industry doing anything unusual. Every ‘permits plunge’ story is built on a chart like this one.

The twelve-month sum is the series to read for the trend, and it is the one this site leads with. Keep both: the smoothed line says what is happening, this one says how much to trust any single reading of it.

What’s coming on seattletrendlines.com the week of September 28 – October 2 — 11 posts on the calendar.

Monday, September 28 — Seattle Fire 911 responses, August 2026; Seattle Fire overdose responses, August 2026; Building permits, month by month, August 2026.

Tuesday, September 29 — The three parks, August 2026; Seattle tech employment, August 2026.

Wednesday, September 30 — Seattle home prices, June 2026; Checkouts per Seattleite, August 2026.

Thursday, October 1 — Checkouts per Seattleite, August 2026; Seattle-metro other services jobs, August 2026.

Friday, October 2 — Washington jobless claims, week of Sep 19, 2026 (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet); Seattle home prices, June 2026 (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet).

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 September 21–25 on seattletrendlines.com, in 12 posts.

Monday, September 21 — King County’s electric fleet, August 2026. King County had 116,264 battery-electric vehicles and 24,431 plug-in hybrids registered in August 2026 — batteries are 83% of the county’s electric fleet. The battery count is up 9.8% from a year earlier.

Monday, September 21 — Electric vehicles on Washington roads, August 2026. 291,146 electric vehicles were registered in Washington in August 2026, up 11.8% from a year earlier. King County holds 140,695 of them — 48% of the state’s fleet, in a county with about a third of its people.

Tuesday, September 22 — What Seattle reports to the city, August 2026. Seattle residents filed 31,472 service requests in August 2026 — potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping, abandoned vehicles, encampments — down 6.1% from a year earlier. 26,992 of them, 86%, came through the Find It, Fix It apps.

Tuesday, September 22 — What a Seattle-area house is worth, August 2026. The typical Seattle-metro home was worth $727,359 in August 2026, down 1.5% from a year earlier. Against the series high of $769,953 in June 2022, that leaves the market 5.5% below its high-water mark.

Tuesday, September 22 — Hospitality’s share of Seattle jobs, August 2026. Leisure and hospitality was 10.0% of Seattle-metro payroll jobs in August 2026 — 214,800 jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels and venues. Read this chart against manufacturing’s, because they are the same story from opposite ends.

Wednesday, September 23 — Seattle wages after inflation, August 2026. Private-sector workers in the Seattle metro averaged $48.08 an hour in August 2026. Adjusted for inflation that is $48.08 in today’s money, up 2.4% from a year earlier.

Wednesday, September 23 — Manufacturing’s share of Seattle jobs, August 2026. Manufacturing was 7.9% of Seattle-metro payroll jobs in August 2026: 168,600 manufacturing jobs against every payroll in the metro. The share peaked at 18.4% in January 1990.

Wednesday, September 23 — Seattle-metro payrolls, August 2026. Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue employers reported 2,143,900 nonfarm jobs in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), up 18,600 — +0.9% — from a year earlier.

Thursday, September 24 — Seattle-metro manufacturing jobs, August 2026. Seattle-metro manufacturers employed 168,600 people in August 2026, up 3.7% from a year earlier. The sector peaked at 246,500 jobs in June 1998 and has shed roughly 32% of that since.

Thursday, September 24 — Washington jobless claims, week of Sep 12, 2026. Washington workers filed 4,767 initial unemployment claims in the week ending Sep 12, 2026; the steadier four-week average is 4,735, down 8.0% from a year ago.

Friday, September 25 — Seattle-metro construction jobs, August 2026. The Seattle metro’s construction and mining employers had 124,000 jobs on payroll in August 2026, down 0.2% from a year earlier.

Friday, September 25 — 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.

The Seattle metro’s construction and mining employers had 124,000 jobs on payroll in August 2026, down 0.2% from a year earlier.

Construction is the most cyclical sector the site tracks and the one that turns first: the crash after 2007 took roughly a third of these jobs out before the wider downturn had properly arrived. It also has a real summer season in the raw data, so — as everywhere in these NSA series — the year-over-year change is the number that means something and a fall from August to January is just weather.

It sits alongside building permits as this site’s two reads on whether Seattle is building. Permits lead; payrolls are what actually happened.

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 to 102,600 in January 1990 — a drop of roughly half, 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.

Seattle-metro manufacturers employed 168,600 people in August 2026, up 3.7% from a year earlier. The sector peaked at 246,500 jobs in June 1998 and has shed roughly 32% of that since.

In this region manufacturing is very close to a Boeing series with a rounding error attached, which is why the deep single-month notches line up with machinist strikes rather than with recessions — the data is not seasonally adjusted, so a walkout shows up whole. Reading them as anything else is the standard mistake with this chart.

The sector’s shrinking share of total payrolls is the same story told against the size of the economy, and it is the more damning version.

Washington workers filed 4,767 initial unemployment claims in the week ending Sep 12, 2026; the steadier four-week average is 4,735, down 8.0% from a year ago. Statewide, weekly, not seasonally adjusted — the update to the jobless-claims post.

Private-sector workers in the Seattle metro averaged $48.08 an hour in August 2026. Adjusted for inflation that is $48.08 in today’s money, up 2.4% from a year earlier.

The two lines are the post. Nominal pay in this region has gone up almost every month for fifteen years, which is the number that gets announced; whether it bought more is a different question, and between 2021 and 2023 the answer was no. The real series peaked at $52.53 in February 2019.

An average, not a median, so it is pulled upward by high earners — this is a metro where that matters more than most. It also moves with who is working: a month that sheds low-wage jobs raises the average without raising anyone’s pay, which is much of what happened in 2020.