Downtown Dashboard
August 2026 (July data)
DSA publishes a monthly dashboard examining dozens of key metrics that affect our urban core’s vitality and local economy. The data sets provide a comparison point to the same period in 2019. Additionally, the dashboard will feature notable stories that provide context regarding downtown’s health and progress.
Please credit the Downtown Seattle Association’s Downtown Dashboard for use of charts, data and images on this page.
Unique monthly visitors compared to 2019
More than 3.7 million unique visitors came downtown in July 2026. This represents 112% of the visitors seen in July 2019 and a 5-point increase from July 2025.
Note: Foot traffic only includes domestic visitors.
Average weekday worker foot traffic
In July, downtown’s worker foot traffic was 64% of July 2019’s daily average. July 2026 averaged merely 150,000 daily workers, similar to the average number the previous month.
Monthly hotel rooms sold compared to 2019
There were nearly 432,000 downtown hotel rooms sold in July 2026. This figure represents 108% of the demand in July 2019, and is flat compared to July 2025, making July 2026 one of the highest months since 2019.
Quarterly
In July, the number of occupied apartment units downtown dipped slightly to nearly 63,000 units. This represents a 1% increase compared to Q3 2025 and a 21% increase compared to Q2 2019.
Of Note in Downtown
Consumer activity was robust the first six months of 2026. According to Datafy, from January through June more than $821.6M was spent downtown, up 6.89% year-over-year.
There were 743,041 Sound Transit Link light rail Sunday boardings in July, averaging more than 123,000 per Sunday. That’s the highest Sunday ridership for a given month in the agency’s history.
Locals flocked to the downtown waterfront in big numbers last month. People who live within 10 miles of downtown made 351,284 visits to the waterfront in July, 25,000 more than the previous high mark in August 2019.
The DSA/MID Clean Team removed 21,901 graffiti tags and stickers from public infrastructure and private property the first seven months of 2026.
Coming Up in Downtown
First Thursdays
The energy turns up a notch or two the first Thursday of each month in Pioneer Square. Billed as the oldest art walk in the country, First Thursday in Pioneer Square is packed with galleries, markets, music and it’s a vibrant scene. The next edition is Thursday, Sept. 3.
Bumbershoot
Labor Day weekend in downtown Seattle is synonymous with Bumbershoot. Two days of live music, an arts district, food and fashion will bring tens of thousands of people to Seattle Center from Sept. 5-6. Headliners this year include Death Cab for Cutie and De La Soul.
The Night Shift at the Market
Enjoy the magic of Pike Place Market after dark on Friday, Aug. 28. The fourth Friday of each month through October, head to The Night Shift at the Market. Live music under the clock sign, food, drinks, a beer garden, art, creativity and community await.
Notes on Sources
Datafy measures consumer spending by analyzing a cross‑section of credit and debit card transactions and cell phone location data.
Downtown foot traffic data are provided by Placer.ai and are based on cell phone location data. Each person is counted once per day. International visitors are not included. Subsets of this data in the charts are as follows:
- Office worker presence is estimated based on visits by workers who were present between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays in downtown Seattle.*
- Hotel data are based on monthly reports from STR, provided by Visit Seattle.
- Apartment occupancy data are from CoStar. This is reported quarterly but the current quarter data are updated in real-time as new information is added to the database.
- Domestic visitors counts those who do not live or work downtown.
- Total foot traffic includes all visits to downtown by domestic visitors, residents and workers.
- Pike Place Market visitors includes domestic visitors who do not live or work at the Pike Place Market.
*Note that workers who have not visited their work site in the past 90 days are classified as “visitors” until they are regularly visiting their work site at least three times in a one-week period.