Seattle’s job market hit a rough patch late last year, with the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area climbing to 5.1% unemployment in November, a 1.1 percentage point jump from a year earlier. It is a sharp turn for a region that, until recently, was cruising on a tech-fueled hiring boom, and the slowdown is already showing up in cooler activity across major recruiting channels.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the metro’s unemployment rate was 5.1% in November 2025, up 1.1 percentage points from November 2024, putting Seattle among the largest year-over-year increases for metro areas with more than 1 million residents. The federal release includes detailed metro tables that spell out how the numbers shifted and where Seattle fits into the wider national picture.
Local analysts and reporting trace the jump largely to tech-sector weakness and a slide in online hiring. As reported by Axios, Paul Turek, a labor economist with the Washington State Employment Security Department, pointed to elevated interest rates, federal policy changes and the tech industry’s pivot toward AI as drags on the region’s recovery. Axios also highlighted a steep drop in local online job postings, shrinking the menu of options for workers trying to move into new roles.
Tech Layoffs Flip the Script on Seattle Hiring
Major local employers have been trimming staff this year, cutting into what has long been a dependable engine of demand in the region. Microsoft announced significant layoffs earlier in 2025, according to CNBC, and Amazon followed with cuts affecting thousands of corporate roles later in the year, per TechCrunch. Those are precisely the kinds of high-paying jobs that usually send money rippling through restaurants, retailers and other local employers, so their disappearance is being felt well beyond corporate campuses.
Data Quirks and What Comes Next
The BLS has warned that a federal government shutdown disrupted data collection for October and November and that “it is not possible to precisely quantify the effect” of that lapse on the estimates, a caveat that makes short-term readings trickier. Economists say the better signal will be whether hiring bounces back in upcoming company announcements and in future monthly labor reports…