Seattle-metro manufacturing jobs, September 2026
Seattle-metro manufacturers employed 167,900 people in September 2026, up 3.3% from a year earlier — 7.8% of all payroll jobs in the metro. The sector peaked at 246,500 jobs in June 1998 and has shed roughly 32% of that since.
The second chart is the more damning one. The share fell from 18.4% in January 1990 to 7.8% now — far faster than the head count, because the rest of the metro’s economy grew while this sector shrank. Both together are why an industry that once shaped the region’s politics now moves its headline employment number hardly at all.
In this region manufacturing is very close to a Boeing series with a rounding error attached, which is why the deep single-month notches in both charts 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.
Numerator and denominator of the share come from the same BLS release for the same metro, so it stays consistent when the levels are revised; it is computed at read time, never stored.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, manufacturing and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.