Washington restaurant and hotel sales, Q3 2025
Washington’s restaurants, bars and other food services made $5.31 billion in taxable sales in Q3 2025. Hotels and other lodging made $1.54 billion.
These are statewide figures, not Seattle’s. The Department of Revenue publishes taxable sales by city and by industry, but not by both; Seattle’s own total, all industries together, has a post of its own. King County is the largest single part of the state’s restaurant and hotel trade, so the state line is the closest published measure of what the region’s restaurants and hotels take in.
The in-today’s-dollars charts matter here more than usual: menu prices and room rates rose fast after 2021, so a dollar total can climb while fewer meals are served. In July 2025 dollars, restaurant sales peaked at $5.32 billion in Q3 2023, hotel sales at $1.61 billion in Q3 2018. Hotels peak in the third quarter every year, so compare a quarter with the same quarter a year earlier. The break in the lines in 2024 is the source’s: DOR’s tables for the third and fourth quarters of 2024 repeat the second quarter’s restaurant and hotel figures to the dollar, so those two quarters are left out rather than drawn. DOR publishes a quarter four to six months after it ends.
Source: Washington State Department of Revenue, Quarterly Business Review, Table 6, retail sales tax by industry, statewide; deflated by the U.S. CPI-U. Auto-generated each build.