Unemployment in the city of Seattle, September 2026
4.5% of the city of Seattle’s labor force was unemployed in September 2026, against 4.5% a year earlier. Across the whole metro area the rate was 4.9% in September 2026. The city’s highest rate in this record was 14.8%, in April 2020.
The city had 513,989 people in its labor force — working or looking for work, against 508,054 a year earlier.
The city is the core of the metro, not a sample of it: more of its residents hold degrees and work in tech, and its rate has sat below the region’s in about four months of every five since 1990. Neither figure is seasonally adjusted — BLS publishes city estimates no other way — so compare a month with the same month a year earlier. The city figures are modelled by BLS from the metro and county estimates and revised each March.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Seattle city and the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area. Auto-generated each build.