Seattle Public Schools spent $23,519 per pupil in 2022, in constant dollars — down 2.1% on the year, and 72% above the series low of $13,702 in 1995. The real peak was $24,313 in 2020.
The per-pupil post runs on OSPI’s figures, which start in 2019 and are the right source for what the district spends now. This chart trades precision for reach: it is the federal F-33 collection, which is coarser and lands two years late, but goes back three decades. Only over that span is the shape visible — a decade of real spending going nowhere, then the McCleary years, when the state supreme court held that Washington was not meeting its constitutional duty to fund basic education and the legislature raised the state property tax to fix it.
Everything here is inflation-adjusted, which is the only honest way to chart a thirty-year budget series: in nominal dollars this line rises almost every year and says nothing. Per-pupil figures also move when enrollment does — a district losing students spends more per head without spending more.
Source: NCES F-33 local education agency finance survey — Urban Institute Education Data Portal through 2019-20, U.S. Census govsschfin thereafter — for LEAID 5307710 (Seattle Public Schools), divided by October headcount enrollment and expressed in constant 2025 dollars. Auto-generated each build.
What’s coming on seattletrendlines.com the week of August 31 – September 4 — 10 posts, two a day, every weekday.
Monday, August 31 — The August roundup (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet); Thirty years of Seattle school spending, to 2022.
Tuesday, September 1 — King County’s share of Washington’s EVs, July 2026; Seattle building permits, July 2026.
Wednesday, September 2 — What share of Seattle works where, July 2026; Battery or plug-in hybrid, July 2026.
Thursday, September 3 — Construction’s share of Seattle jobs, July 2026; Sea-Tac against normal, July 2026 (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet).
Friday, September 4 — King County for-sale inventory, July 2026 (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet); What King County sellers listed, July 2026 (pending — its numbers haven’t landed yet).
This is the plan, not a promise. Every weekday post here is tied to a data release, and a release that slips takes its post with it — the post simply waits for the day its numbers land. A figure that arrives early, a revision worth writing about, or an unexpected story out of Seattle can just as easily add a post that isn’t on this list. Expect the week to look roughly like this, and expect at least one day of it not to.
The week of August 24–28 on seattletrendlines.com, in 10 posts.
Monday, August 24 — King County homes under contract, July 2026. 2,013 King County homes were under contract at the end of July 2026, down 17.0% from a year earlier. The count has run between 1,228 (January 2019) and 4,176 (June 2021).
Monday, August 24 — Seattle’s cruise business: from a 2020 shutdown to a record 1.9 million. The Port of Seattle carried a record 1.9 million cruise passengers in 2025 — up about 57% from its pre-pandemic 2019 level. Four years earlier, in 2020, the number was zero.
Tuesday, August 25 — King County’s electric fleet, July 2026. King County had 138,528 plug-in vehicles registered in July 2026. The split is the interesting part: 114,671 battery-electric cars, up 10.0% on the year, against 23,857 plug-in hybrids, up 1.8%.
Tuesday, August 25 — New listings per 10,000 King County residents, June 2026. King County sellers listed 2,940 homes in June 2026 — 13.3 per 10,000 county residents, up 1.9% on the year as a rate.
Wednesday, August 26 — What moves through the gateway, 2025. The Northwest Seaport Alliance moved 1,157,002 TEUs of full imports in 2025, down 10.3% on the year, against 605,126 TEUs of full exports and 656,406 TEUs of empty boxes.
Wednesday, August 26 — The river Seattle drinks, July 2026. The Cedar River ran at 342 cubic feet per second in July 2026, measured just above the Landsburg intake that supplies about two thirds of Seattle’s drinking water. That is what arrives, before the city takes its share.
Thursday, August 27 — What it costs to keep Seattle comfortable, 2025. Sea-Tac ran up 328 cooling degree days in 2025 and 4,254 heating degree days.
Thursday, August 27 — City and county, 1990 to 2026. Seattle had 823,400 residents on April 1, 2026, and King County 2,424,700. Since 1990 the city has grown 59% and the county 61%.
Friday, August 28 — Seattle building permits, July 2026. On a trailing 12-month basis, the Seattle metro permitted 20,712 housing units through July 2026, up 35.8% from a year earlier. This updates the permit slump; the 12-month sum smooths the monthly noise so the trend is the signal.
Friday, August 28 — Seattle’s crimes against society, June 2026. Seattle police recorded 645 crimes against society in June 2026, up 56.9% from a year earlier.
The week in review: every post from August 24–28, summarised from its own listing blurb and linked. Assembled each Saturday from the posts that actually published that week.
Seattle police recorded 645 crimes against society in June 2026, up 56.9% from a year earlier. It is the third NIBRS category, the one the monthly crime post charts the other two of: drug and narcotic offenses, weapon-law violations, prostitution, gambling, animal cruelty.
It is also the category that measures the police rather than the city. There is no victim to call 911 about a drug offense, so almost every one of these exists because an officer went looking — which makes the line a read on enforcement policy and staffing, not on how much of any of this is happening. When it moves, ask what changed at the department before asking what changed on the street. The rest of the crime data has a version of this problem; here it is the whole of it.
Offenses, not incidents, and the recent months revise upward as reports land. The chart starts in 2020 because SPD changed records systems in 2019 and the counts on either side of that are not comparable.
Source: Seattle Police Department, SPD Crime Data 2008-Present, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tazs-3rd5), NIBRS crimes-against-society category. Auto-generated each build.
On a trailing 12-month basis, the Seattle metro permitted 20,712 housing units through July 2026, up 35.8% from a year earlier. This updates the permit slump; the 12-month sum smooths the monthly noise so the trend is the signal.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue MSA, trailing 12-month sum. Auto-generated each build.
Seattle had 823,400 residents on April 1, 2026, and King County 2,424,700. Since 1990 the city has grown 59% and the county 61%.
Put the two on one chart and a question falls out that neither answers alone: is Seattle absorbing the region’s growth, or exporting it? The city holds 34.0% of the county’s people today. That share fell for decades as the suburbs filled, and it has been climbing back since the 2010s — the reversal is the story in this pair of lines, and it is the demographic fact underneath every argument this city has about density.
These are Washington OFM’s April 1 estimates, the official series used to allocate state revenue, so they are re-based whenever a decennial census lands. The annual population post covers the latest year on its own; this is the long view.
Source: Washington State Office of Financial Management, April 1 official population estimates for the city of Seattle and King County. Auto-generated each build.
Sea-Tac ran up 328 cooling degree days in 2025 and 4,254 heating degree days. A degree day is one degree of gap between the day’s mean temperature and 65°F, summed over the year — a rough measure of how hard a building has to work, and the number utilities plan around.
The cooling side is the one that moved. Averaged over ten years to smooth the summers out, cooling degree days have gone from 64 in the decade ending 1957 to 353 in the decade ending 2025 — about 5.5 times what it was. That is the number behind every story about air conditioning arriving in a city that was built without it. The single worst year on record was 474 in 2015; the mildest was 6 in 1954.
And yet the building’s total work went down, not up. Heating degree days fell from 5,545 to 4,300 across the same span — a drop of 1,245 against a cooling rise of only 289. Seattle is a heating city with a warming climate, so the furnace saves far more than the air conditioner spends. That is a statement about degrees, not about energy: the two loads are not interchangeable — heat here is largely gas and electric resistance in winter, cooling is electricity on the summer afternoons when the grid is tightest. A smaller total load can still mean a higher peak.
The station is the caveat, and it is the same one the monthly Sea-Tac anomaly post carries. Sea-Tac is the only continuous daily record here back to 1948, and it is an airport with a great deal more tarmac around the thermometer than it had then. Some of the cooling-side climb is the airport growing rather than the region warming. Unlike the anomaly series, degree days have no fixed baseline to protect them from that — they are absolute counts — so read the direction rather than the decimal. Only complete calendar years are charted.
Source: NOAA Global Historical Climatology Network daily records for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (USW00024233), retrieved through RCC-ACIS, degree days base 65°F summed over each complete calendar year. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.
The Cedar River ran at 342 cubic feet per second in July 2026, measured just above the Landsburg intake that supplies about two thirds of Seattle’s drinking water. That is what arrives, before the city takes its share.
That is 85% of the July average, which is the only comparison worth making. This is a rain-and-snowmelt river, so the sawtooth in the chart is the season rather than the supply: every year is high in winter and low in September, and a wet January says nothing about whether there will be enough in August. Across 37 years, July has averaged 404 cfs — the driest was 263 (1992) and the wettest 674 (1997). The late-summer low is the number that decides anything, because that is when the city is living on what the winter banked.
This is half of the water-supply picture, and the missing half is storage. Chester Morse Lake and the Masonry Pool are what carry the city from the last of the snowmelt to the first autumn rain, and neither reservoir publishes a machine-readable level — so this post charts the flow and says plainly that it cannot tell you how full the tank is. The snowpack post upstream of this one is the other leading indicator, through the winter, and it runs December to May. Recent months are provisional and get revised.
Source: U.S. Geological Survey, NWIS daily values, gauge 12117500 (Cedar River near Landsburg, WA), monthly mean of daily mean discharge. Measured above the Landsburg intake, so it is inflow rather than what the city withdraws. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.
The Northwest Seaport Alliance moved 1,157,002 TEUs of full imports in 2025, down 10.3% on the year, against 605,126 TEUs of full exports and 656,406 TEUs of empty boxes.
The headline container number adds those together, and in doing so hides the thing worth knowing: for every container of goods leaving Seattle and Tacoma, roughly 1.9 arrive. The balance did not use to be that lopsided. Exports have fallen while imports have held, and the difference has to sail back out as air — which is why the empties line matters. An empty container is a paid movement of nothing, and its share of the total is a direct measure of how one-directional this gateway has become.
International volumes only, so the Alaska and Hawai’i domestic trades are excluded. TEUs count boxes rather than value, so a container of aircraft parts and a container of hay weigh the same here. Annual figures — the Alliance reports monthly, but only the year totals are wired into this site.
Source: Northwest Seaport Alliance container volume reports, international full imports, full exports and empty containers, annual totals in TEUs. Auto-generated each build.
King County sellers listed 2,940 homes in June 2026 — 13.3 per 10,000 county residents, up 1.9% on the year as a rate.
Per head is what makes this series comparable across a decade, because King County in June 2026 holds a few hundred thousand more people than the one the series starts in: a listing count that merely held flat would be a market quietly thinning out relative to the county it has to house. The series opens at 16.0 per 10,000 in July 2016 and reaches 13.3 now.
Read the peaks and troughs as seasons, not as news. New listings run a hard annual sawtooth — sellers come to market in spring and go quiet in December — so the high of 21.1 in May 2018 and the low of 2.9 in December 2022 are the two ends of that cycle as much as they are the two ends of a trend. The year-on-year change is the honest comparison, and it puts June 2026 1.9% above the same month a year earlier.
This counts listings appearing, not homes selling: it is the supply side of the market, and the listing count itself is the right measure of how much work the market is doing. This one measures how much housing reaches the market relative to the size of the county. The denominator is OFM’s April 1 county estimate, interpolated between years rather than held as a step — county population between estimates genuinely moves smoothly, and a step would inject a false twelve-month sawtooth into a series that already has a real one.
Sources: Realtor.com Real Estate Data monthly inventory, King County (new listing count); Washington State Office of Financial Management April 1 county population estimates, interpolated to monthly. The rate is computed from the two series at build time rather than stored. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.