Seattle-metro government jobs, September 2026
Seattle-metro government employers had 282,400 people on payroll in September 2026, down 1.4% from a year earlier. That is 13.2% of all payroll jobs in the metro, against 13.5% a year before.
Federal, state and local government, including public schools, the University of Washington, public hospitals and the Postal Service — and, because BLS counts them as local government, tribal enterprises such as casinos. Uniformed military personnel are not in any payroll survey, so the bases in Pierce County show up only through their civilian staff. Government hiring follows tax revenue with a lag, which is why its share tends to rise in a recession: the private sector cuts first. The deep sawtooth in both lines is the school year — public-school staff come off the payroll count every summer — so this series above all needs the year-over-year comparison.
The two charts answer different questions. The count peaked at 297,900 in May 2025 and says whether the sector is hiring. The share — from 14.6% in January 1990, with a high of 16.4% in May 2010 and a low of 12.2% in August 2022 — 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, government and total nonfarm payrolls, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED (SEAT653GOVTN, SEAT653NAN). The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.