Seattle-metro construction jobs, September 2026
The Seattle metro’s construction and mining employers had 124,400 jobs on payroll in September 2026, up 1.1% from a year earlier. That is 5.8% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 5.8% a year before.
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. The share chart shows it without the flattery of a growing economy — it peaked at 7.5% in August 2007 and bottomed at 4.5% in January 2012, a measure of how much of the region’s labour is pointed at building anything.
It 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. 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, mining, logging and construction and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.