Seattle library checkouts, July 2026
Seattle Public Library patrons checked out 869,036 items in July 2026, up 5.7% from a year earlier. The series counts checkout events rather than borrowers, and it runs back to 2005 — long enough to show the 2020 branch closures as the cliff they were. What came back afterward is not what left: the recovery is substantially digital, so the physical/digital mix on either side of 2020 is not the same library.
Corrected 2026-09-29: this post first reported 248,692 checkouts for July 2026, up 3.8% on the year. That figure counted the titles checked out, not the checkouts; each title can go out many times in a month. The chart and figures above are now total checkouts.
Source: Seattle Public Library, Checkouts by Title, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tmmm-ytt6). Auto-generated each build.