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 week in review: every post from September 28 – October 2, summarised from its own listing blurb and linked. Assembled each Saturday from the posts that actually published that week.
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.
Source: Seattle Customer Service Bureau, Customer Service Requests, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata 5ngg-rpne), all intake channels. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.
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.
Source: S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Seattle Home Price Indices, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEXRNSA and the tier series). Auto-generated each build.
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.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, other services and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653SRVON, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.
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.
Sources: Seattle Public Library, Checkouts by Title, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tmmm-ytt6); Washington State Office of Financial Management April 1 population estimates for the city of Seattle, interpolated to monthly. Auto-generated each build.
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.
Source: S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Seattle Home Price Indices, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEXRNSA and the tier series). Auto-generated each build.
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.
Sources: Seattle Public Library, Checkouts by Title, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tmmm-ytt6); Washington State Office of Financial Management April 1 population estimates for the city of Seattle, interpolated to monthly. Auto-generated each build.
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.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, information sector, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653INFON). Auto-generated each build.
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.
Source: U.S. National Park Service, IRMA visitor use statistics, monthly recreation visits to Mount Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades national parks. North Cascades figures are the park proper and exclude the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas, which is why that series steps down after 1990. Auto-generated each build.